Congressional staff say the mood inside the Capitol is tense, stifling and bewildering as members brush off their constituents’ outrage.
Congressional staff say the mood inside the Capitol is tense, stifling and bewildering as members brush off their constituents’ outrage.
Why should they be expected to have the manpower to answer every single one? A voicemail gets the message across perfectly fine.
Because they are expected to consider the opinions of their constituents, and as an elected representative and they are supposed to represent our interests, not theirs.
To be able to functionally listen to your constituents, yes, you need the staff to be able to do it.
You think that listening to and transcribing voicemails somehow takes less time than taking a call? Pro-tip, they take about the same amount of time.
I mean, with that attitude, why have any staff at all? Just let it all go to voicemail and never read any of those thousands of emails from constituents! Fuck 'em! Fuck representative democracy, amirite?
Direct voting is the future.
Agreed. Elected officials need to be reduced to figureheads who craft legislation and whose voting power on legislation is removed and given to the people.
When legislation is introduced, it should be in a Wiki format and with logins tied to your voter registration so only registered voters can comment and edit the Wiki.
All final edits will be attributable directly to who wrote them and version control would be the standard for the documents.
The final text and vote should be with individual voters here in the 21st century.
A guy can dream.
Honestly, that’s not perfect either. Switzerland has had direct voting for a very long time. They also stopped women from getting the right to vote until 1971 through that direct voting.
I see you’ve talked to my “representative.” At one point he shut down all his local offices and refused to meet with any member of the public
computers can transcribe the voice mail messages much faster and more efficiently than an intern can answer the calls and deal with each one individually.
that is, of course, with the assumption that they actually do that… and don’t just hit DELETE ALL or let the voice mailbox ‘fill up’.
Honestly, yeah. From what I’ve heard about Congressional offices, they basically just count the number of people expressing an opinion for/against a particular issue, and report that to the congressperson. Mail, calls, voicemail, emails, everything.