Congress Phone System Is BrokenBut Its Still Your Best Shot
But It’s Still Your Best Shot
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/call-congress-phone-system-broken/?mbid=nl_2317_p4&CNDID=30772003
IN TIMES OF political turmoil and controversy, Senate and House office phone lines come under siege. In 2011, Obama exhorted the American people to contact their Congresspeople about the rising debt ceiling, and the flood of callers rendered phone lines useless (and crashed a bunch of websites just for good measure.) In 2010, Lady Gaga’s call to action regarding Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell meant even Gaga herself couldn’t get hold of Senator Chuck Schumer. Heck, two years after the first phones were installed in the Capitol Building in 1880, House doorkeeper Walter Brownlow was so overloaded by calls he asked permission to hire someone dedicated to answering them.
Even in 2017, in the age of Twitter and Facebook and WhatsApp and email and chatbots and internet-enabled fax machines, a phone call is the best way to not just reach your representative, but affect them. “It’s just a matter of how people process information,” says Kris Miler, who researches politics and government at the University of Maryland. Miler’s book, Constituency Representation in Congress, explores the ways legislators understand and respond to their constituents. She distinguished between personal contact—either on the phone or face-to-face—and things like email and faxes. “Both have an impact,” she says, “but the impact of personal and phone calls was much stronger.”
In the ever-present turmoil wrought by the early days of the Trump administration, the volume of phone calls has been off the charts. “People don’t call Congress when they’re happy,” says Daniel Schuman, policy director at advocacy group Demand Progress. “They call when they’re unhappy. And right now they’re scared out of their minds.” People complain about not being able to reach their representatives, while government officials complain about not getting any work done thanks to incessantly ringing phones. One particularly distraught staffer of California Senator Dianne Feinstein was caught on video saying all the calls “broke my BlackBerry. And it’s close to breaking my desktop.”
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