US House Limits Constituent Emails

Plechazunga passes along this note from The Hill: "The House is limiting e-mails from the public to prevent its websites from crashing due to the enormous amount of mail being submitted on the financial bailout bill. As a result, some constituents may get a 'try back at a later time' response if they use the House website to e-mail their lawmakers about the bill defeated in the House on Monday in a 205-228 vote."

Comments

Yet another win for open government!

[omega_dk]

I would like to take this chance to encourage everyone to support groups working towards open government, from Black Box Voting to Verified Voting, and everything in between.

The government is supposed to work for us; until we limit how often lobbyists talk to them, what right do they have to limit how much we talk to them?

Yes, OK

[dazedNconfuzed]

A bank "going under" does not take all the depositors' money with it. If bankrupt, the bank is given time to reorganize and recover intact. If sold or taken over, assets, which include bank accounts, investments, and deposits, are sold to another company which will maintain the customers. There is also FDIC and other regulations in place to ensure you'll get your money back unless you did something stupid.

The days of "sorry, no money, we're closed" are gone (unless we suffer a vast & total meltdown of our economy, which is still far off).

From the other side

[schwanerhill]

I've been involved both in lobbying and in a Congressional (House) office (as an unpaid intern). Constituent contacts really do matter: a significant fraction of the staff's time is spent reading and distilling these letters for the Congress(wo)man. On this issue, the letters are nearly universally against the rescue package, which is the only reason Congress went against the opinions of the vast majority of economists (my favorite is Paul Krugman) to vote down this bill. If you think your voice doesn't matter to your Congressman, you're crazy, even though (s)he won't always agree.

I know this is hard to believe, but direct bribes don't work. Organizing large numbers of constituents to call/email a Congressman does often work, largely because it demonstrates that you could also organize voters to challenge the Congressman at the ballot box. (That kind of organization takes money, so if anyone wants to consider that a bribe, fine; I consider it democracy.) However, an office will get tens or hundreds of copies of the same form letter from large numbers of constituents; those identical letters count less (though not hugely less) than personally written letters or phone calls.

(As of 4 years ago, when I interned in DC, phone calls, emails, faxes, and snail-mail letters count equally, but snail-mail letters take multiple weeks to get to the DC office because of anthrax-related security. Letters from in-state but out-of-district are read but carry less weight than contacts from constituents and are unlikely to get a response; letters from out-of-state or without a name and mailing address go straight to the recycling bin.)