I just didn’t see the point. My senators were already doing their job, and my representative has shown in the past that he toes the Republican line, and doesn’t care all that much about his Democratic constituents. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to be voting against in the primary.
Plus I know first hand how much people hate Obamacare. Someone I once greatly respected called me out in a Facebook post–one where I was being conciliatory about the whole thing, even saying that, if Obamacare did actually fail, I would be first in line trying to get it repealed. I normally don’t unfriend people, but I was really close to doing so for her–the only thing stopping me was that she’s related to some other people I respect and I didn’t want to start anything.
Anyways, that whole last paragraph was to say that I would be very overwhelmed by people who thought the exact opposite, to the point of a pastor’s wife responding that way to me.
I contacted the offices of my two senators ( Feinstein and Boxer ) and House Rep. ( Miller ) via e-mail and I presume some staffer made a note of my comments. All three, for the most part, represent my views.
My Congressman is a Dem, fighting the good fight. My older senator is a Dem & also fighting the good fight. I fought my ass off so the new Senator from my state is named ‘Booker’ and not some bought-and-paid-for Tea-Party shill called Lonegan.
They are working hard for my interests and I agree with them. Why in the world would I stop them from doing their very best by calling them to the phone???
I am a liberal Democrat who lives in Mississippi. There is absolutely no chance anything I might say would have any influence on my congressman. (And, to be honest, it probably shouldn’t, since I don’t represent the majority of his constituents, I didn’t vote for him, and I’m unlikely ever to do so in any subsequent election unless the opposing candidate is massively corrupt.)
None of the above, really. I emailed both senators and the representative, all (D), to express my displeasure at the situation and let them know that though I didn’t blame them for the idiocy, I did hold them responsible. (In other words, sorry you have to deal with these morons, but… you have to deal with these morons.) I sent a post-shutdown thank-you to my rep. Boxer and Feinstein each represent over thirty million people, so I figured they wouldn’t notice the lack of a note from me.
Spice Weasel, they don’t really care what you say. They just keep a tally of how many of their calls / emails / letters are for or against the issue of the day, and how great the volume is on any given issue.
Sent them a few Tweets but that’s it. I realize that my 140 character missives were, at best, tallied by an intern somewhere and no one I’ve heard of actually looked at them.
Here in Illinois we had Senator Kirk ® who, by all appearances, spent the shutdown appearing at WWII Memorial photo-ops and then bragging about how he helped forge the bipartisan compromise after it was over. I told him I hope those photo-ops were worth the $24 billion lost to the US economy.
The other guy, Senator Durbin (D) is Asst. Majority Leader so at least he was actually working on something. My congressman is a Democrat but there wasn’t much for House Dems to do but wait for the Speaker to finally put out a real bill for them to vote on.
