Staying In Touch With Your Congressperson

People attempting to contact their representatives concerning the stimulus bill have run into a few roadblocks. For one thing, right wing talk show hosts have been urging their listeners to call and voice objections to passage, so Capitol Hill phone lines have been swamped. People going to web sites have often found them unresponsive, as servers are overloaded. Anyway, how can we know there’s even a person on the other end?

I have always thought that the best way to contact a representative was a personal and short (and oh, I need to be reminded, respectful) letter. Form letters and post cards tend to be taken lightly – people who sent them obviously didn’t think much about content. And letters with repetitive wording tend to have less weight than those with original wording. (So the next time your local environmental group tells you to write to your congressperson and tell him “Here’s what I think about such and such”, think of a clever new way to word it. Better yet, express your own thoughts.)

I learned all of that from working with a former legislative assistant. But times have changed – there was no Internet at that time. Now we can email them. Right? Don’t bother. They get so many emails, which are so easy to generate, that they just don’t get read. They might be scanned for key words and replies might be generated automatically. Maybe. Most go unnoticed, unrecorded, and certainly unread. (By the way, Internet petitions are a cruel joke – a way of collecting email addresses for other purposes. Our “right to petition for redress of grievances” means real signatures on real paper- not electronic.)

Anyway, even letters, as I understand it from talk radio, are now kind of useless too – it seems that after the anthrax scares of 2003, all mail going to Capitol Hill is being scanned, and it’s quite a long process. So if you wrote your congressperson yesterday about the stimulus bill, she should be hearing from you in, say …., two weeks. Maybe longer.

So it comes down to a phone call. They do log phone calls, and phone calls have the advantage of immediate gratification. But what to do when the Dittoheads are clogging the lines? Our last and best option is to call the local office, or any local office in the state. Caller ID reveals area code, so it has to be in-state. But local offices do log calls and report results to the head honchos. It’s the last best way to stay in touch.