Can you call senators

But what makes a particular type of message effective depends largely on what you are trying to achieve. For mass protests, such as those that have been happening recently, phone calls are a better way of contacting lawmakers, not because they get taken more seriously but because they take up more time—thereby occupying staff, obstructing business as usual, and attracting media attention.

E-mails get the message through but are comparatively swift and easy for staffers to process, while conventional mail is at a disadvantage when speed matters, since, in addition to the time spent in transit, anything sent to Congress is temporarily held for testing and decontamination, to protect employees from mail bombs and toxins.

Afterward, most constituent mail is scanned and forwarded to congressional offices as an electronic image.

In other words, your letter will not arrive overnight, and it will not arrive with those grains of Iowa wheat or eau de constituent you put in it. But, once it shows up, it will be taken at least as seriously as a call. Carter Moore, a former staff assistant for the late congresswoman Julia Carson, of Indiana, recounted an anecdote about a constituent who decided to write a letter on immigration to every member of Congress.

One morning, Moore came in to work and found, piled up in his office, hundreds of identical envelopes, forwarded unopened. These last have a particularly bad reputation.

According to the C. Likewise, phone calls that hew to scripts from advocacy organizations usually get downgraded, especially if the caller seems ill-informed about the issue. Such calls also tend to annoy staffers. Jo Bonner, as he is known, was the victim of one of the few recurring errors made by the congressional operators, a result of having served in the House at the same time as John Boehner.

Regardless of how they choose to do so, most people who contact Congress have legitimate concerns—but, as any staffer can tell you, there is a small but enduring subgroup of wiseacres and crackpots.

Moore, the former congressional staffer, once took a call from a man who claimed, in all seriousness, to be the true and rightful owner of the moon. Such oddities aside, most communications to Congress fall into one of two categories. The second category, conversely, might be called constituent demands: someone calls and expresses a political preference to anyone who answers the phone and hopes that his or her legislator will act on it.

It is a curious thing about Americans that we simultaneously believe nothing gets done in Congress and have faith that this strategy works. If you ask your senator to co-sponsor a bill on mud-flap dimensions or to propose a change to the bottling requirements for apple cider or to vote in favor of increased funding for a rare childhood disease, you stand a decent chance of succeeding.

This is not a trivial point, since such requests make up the majority of those raised by constituents. They also represent the underappreciated but crucial role that average citizens play in the legislative process. If, however, you want a member of Congress to vote your way on a matter of intense partisan fervor—immigration, education, entitlement programs, health insurance, climate change, gun control, abortion—your odds of success are, to understate matters, considerably slimmer.

To borrow an example from the C. When I asked past and present Congress members and high-level staffers if constituent input mattered, all of them emphasized that it absolutely does. But when I asked them to name a time that a legislator had changed his or her vote on the basis of such input, I got, in every instance, a laugh, and then a very long pause.

And it is true that those influences are potent, while our own has been compromised in recent times by gerrymandering; politicians in the safe districts which that practice creates are still vulnerable to challenges from their base, as the Tea Party demonstrated in , but oppositional voices, like oppositional votes, are less effective than they once were. But those very long pauses also reflected a legitimate and enduring conundrum of political theory: to what extent the job of a representative is to represent.

For one thing, those lawmakers have access to information and expertise unavailable to the rest of us. For another, everyone loves the idea of Congress members heeding their constituents, right up until we disagree with what those constituents think.

The senator hailed from a deep-red state, and the phones were ringing off the hook. Fitch asked the harried assistant if the calls were running ninety-nine to one against the proposed legislation. The senator voted for it anyway. For all that, constituents are not voiceless in a democracy, and every once in a while they do score major legislative wins.

In , Congress tried to give itself a fifty-per-cent pay raise, and the American public rebelled. In late , the House passed a heavily lobbied-for immigration-reform bill that increased fines and prison sentences on the undocumented and made it a crime to offer them certain kinds of aid; its chances in the Senate were then swiftly tanked by a citizen uprising, including one of the first successful mass mobilizations of the Latino community against a piece of legislation.

In , what should have been a pair of obscure little intellectual-property bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act sopa and the Protect IP Act PIPA , provoked such a massive outcry that nearly a fifth of senators withdrew their support in a single day, and the acts were effectively killed. Why constituents succeeded in making themselves heard in these cases while failing in others is difficult to say; political causality is famously, enormously complicated. Tasked with representing anywhere from seven hundred and fifty thousand people to tens of millions of them, most lawmakers are familiar with only a tiny fraction of their district or state.

SOPA is a good example of this. Before it failed, Congress members considering an intellectual-property bill were most likely to think about its potential impact on major copyright holders like the Walt Disney Corporation. Today, no one can contemplate such legislation without remembering other constituents, from librarians to the tech community, and adjusting plans and votes accordingly. For constituent activity to have more immediate effects on the actions of lawmakers, however, other conditions—most of them necessary, none of them necessarily sufficient—must apply.

Broadly speaking, these include a huge quantity of people acting in concert, an unusually high pitch of passion, a specific countervailing vision, and consistent press coverage unfavorable to sitting politicians. Such conditions do not emerge very often in American politics, but, when they do, pundits routinely describe them with recourse to the metaphor of a flood. Calls pour in; dams threaten to burst; legislators are deluged, inundated, swamped. That language is vivid but hardly precise, so I asked Carter Moore how he might quantify a flood.

Well, call it a flood. At their district state office. They have to talk to you there. Now, with a changing government Americans have more reason than ever to voice both concerns and support for policymakers decisions. Congress is receiving more calls than ever. And, if done in the right way, this can lead to powerful change. Call first, rant on Facebook later. Calling Congress is the most effective way to send a message. Twitter and emails serve a different function — they signify to political leader what topics constituents are interested in, as most are sorted by algorithms today.

They do get seen, but not as immediately as talking to someone on the phone. Calls, on the other hand, are answered by staff, recorded then a list is given to the senator or congressman. Not sure who your senators, or local congressional representatives are? Find senators by zip code here. Look up your House representative here.

Pro tip: Call your representatives local district offices. They usually have more staff available to talk to constituents than a Washington office. The issue is of national importance.

Many issues are, and votes taken by Senators certainly affect all Americans, not just constituents from their state. The MoC is in House or Senate leadership. Yes, majority and minority leaders and other members of leadership are in charge of their entire caucuses, and they hold more influence and power than anyone else in their party. You should only call Nancy Pelosi if you live in California's 12th Congressional district.

You should only call Mitch McConnell if you live in Kentucky. And you should only call Chuck Schumer if you live in New York, for all of the same reasons above. The senator is a swing vote. If a Senator is on the fence on an issue, it means they are going to weight the views of their constituents even more heavily than they usually would.

But to do that, they have to be able to hear from their own constituents. The MoC is on a specific committee of jurisdiction over an issue. Committee assignments matter, and members of committees of jurisdiction sometimes have more influence than members off-committee.

But that makes it all the more important that constituents of that MoC make phone calls to them—not that everyone makes phone calls to them. Going to a town hall.