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. Call it, like Noah, the flood. Never mind the end of the day; last month, Senator Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican, got three thousand calls in one night. Senator Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, got thirty-one thousand in three weeks.
Last year, in a fourteen-day period in January, Senator Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, got a thousand pieces of mail on the subject of education; this year, during that same period, he got forty-five thousand. Compared with , his over-all constituent correspondence shot up nine hundred per cent. Members of Congress claim that, Senate-wide, the call volume for the week of January 30, , more than doubled the previous record; on average, during that week, the Senate got 1.
Three of those days—January 31st, February 1st, and February 2nd—were the busiest in the history of the Capitol switchboard. You said no. You melted their servers. From all around the world your messages dominated social media and the news. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet. It is worth noting that Wikipedia is a charitable institution with no paying customers, shareholders or investors.
Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google functioned as normal — though the latter did black out its dynamic logo. Petitions opposing the bills have attracted more than 50, signatures. Mastercard and Visa are also listed. The list includes many trade associations and unions in IP-related industries.
The movie industry alone claims that it supports 2. The Business Software Alliance, which counts both copyright owners and tech companies among its members, originally backed SOPA but later withdrew its support. In fact, though, many of the issues highlighted by Wikipedia and others were already being discussed. It addressed much of what tech companies complained about, such as removing the requirement for intermediaries to act within five days; not specifying domain name blocking; and removing the requirement to target sub-domains.
But the statement went on to emphasise the need to tackle rogue sites both through legislation and voluntary measures. Meanwhile, some sponsors of the bills have recently withdrawn their support. In the Senate, a hearing scheduled for this week has been postponed to next month.
Not necessarily. And once two bills are passed they will have to be reconciled, which will take time. Given the controversy, the divisions in Congress, the complexity of the legislation, other political priorities and the fact that is an election year, there is no guarantee that any bills will be passed soon.
The United States is particularly vulnerable due to the importance of the creative industries including movies, music and sports in its economy. It has not yet been implemented and telecoms companies BT and TalkTalk were again in court this week, seeking to have the Act reviewed on the grounds that it does not comply with EU law. Separately, a judge ordered BT to block access to the Newzbin file-sharing site, after it sought to escape jurisdiction by moving its servers offshore and changing its name.
France has passed the so-called Hadopi Act and Spain announced anti-piracy legislation at the end of last year. New Zealand is another country that prompted a blackout with its anti-piracy proposals.
But look at what happened. No, this was the Web itself rising up in anger and showing in a very practical way what it means to even consider allowing a government to regulate — scratch that, censor — the medium. You will excuse me for reminding you of the obvious: This is America.
Even the most socially or socialist minded have no patience with government intruding into our private lives, and we define that perimeter very widely. Those industries simply overplayed their hands on a complicated issue that is fundamentally correct by siding with a few politicians to offer a cure that kills the patient. And then there were a number of thoughtful legislators who simply got this wrong.
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