Saturday, March 20, 2010

A report on visiting the local office of my congressman

Yesterday I went to the local office for my congressman. It was a scouting expedition. I had never been before and was curious to see how it was set up.

One of the interesting things I observed was a list of topics on a whiteboard. These were issues raised by people who dropped in during the week. Here is the list:

1) Feel too much money going to jail
2) Spending too much money
3) HR 4789 Medicare
4) Bonus for bilingual Federal employees
5) Extend unemployment benefits
6) HR 3590
7) More money for schools
8) HR 678 Huntington disease
9) IRS enforcement of HC Reform
10) Against bilingual proposal
11) Immigration reform amnesty for illegals
12) Health care reform

There were two columns to the right of these issues, the first column was how many were for the particular issue, and the second was how many were against.

The surprising thing to me was there were only 22 tick marks total! In the last week only 22 people had dropped in to register their concern about various issues. And of the above twelve issues, six of them were raised by just one person.

If your congressman has a local office close to you, it may be worth a few minutes to drop by and register your concerns. You could easily be the only person to raise your particular issue that week.


If you happen to visit your congressman’s local office, please tell me how it goes.

1 comment:

  1. Last fall, when I discovered that, despite the upcoming elections, not one of my students knew who their congressional representative was, I decided to assign them the task of looking up their district and writing about their representative's view on some economic issue. The feedback I received was positive. Many of the students really appreciated their new-found knowledge. I'm hoping to do something similar this spring.

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