You Should Know

Yeah — pretty much this. Most people answering phones are interns. They’re given instructions to listen and be non-confrontational. They also won’t tell you what the congressperson’s view on the matter is. Ultimately, they have no power and just try to summarize what you said and put it in a computer program with your address so the office can mail you a letter from the Congressperson about the issue. These letters are generic to the topic you called about and generally try to say nothing controversial.

On rare occasions for really contentious issues, I saw them split the topic buckets into pro and con and send letters for each depending on whether you were for or against the thing you called about.

Mostly, I didn’t get the impression that Congress people pay much attention to phone calls. If the issue is contentious enough to divide the caller pool into pro/con, they might check a tally of the totals in each pool. But, for 99% of topics, they just send you a generic letter.

Also, a lot of these letters are full of bs. Congress people will often propose nice sounding bill names or cosponsor others that they can cite in these letters as evidence that they care. However, 99% of these bills go no where and often the congresspeople don’t even want them to. You’re upset about airplane noise over your city? “Well, I agree, that’s why I cosponsored the airplane noise reduction act.” Meanwhile, if that bill ever picked up steam the airline lobby would crush it and your congressperson would help them.

So, I don’t call my congressperson because I don’t really get the sense that it makes a difference. One thing I did see make a difference though was lobbyists. You see, they live right in Washington DC and rather than call, they schedule meetings with the actual paid staff or congressperson, not interns. They go right in their office and sit down and have a long chat. And, the staff have a big incentive to listen to them.

Most congressional staff are paid peanuts. They try to live off $25-45k/year in an expensive city and have 2 or 3 roommates. Some of them are often overqualified, holding law degrees and masters in their interest areas. So, once they get some experience and burn out of this life of poverty, guess who is happy to scoop them up? Yep, they go running right into the arms of those lobbyists and gladly take that $200k salary to go about fighting insulin price caps or defeating environmental regulations. It doesn’t even matter if they came into Washington, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed ready to take on these big corporate interests. By the time they’re 3-4 years in, realize they’re sick of eating ramen noodles, and the easiest way out is to call up some of those lobbyists and ask for a job, they do it. Oh you have a masters in agricultural policy with a specialization in organic farming? McDonald’s federal affairs office will hire you. I’ve seen it happen.