How to Talk to Your Member of Congress

Sometimes, you just have to get in touch with your member of Congress. Perhaps Congress is taking up an issue — the minimum wage, say, or a bill to promote medical research — that would make a difference in your life. Maybe some matter is embroiling your community, such as growing drug problems at the high school or a proposed urban renewal project that will destroy a neighborhood.

Or you might just want to suggest that Congress start acting like the independent branch it’s supposed to be, rather than a rubber stamp for the White House.

Whatever the case, you can always write a letter or send an e-mail — the more personalized, the better. This is the most common form of communication with Congress. But there are times when a letter doesn’t seem enough. So how do you go about getting your Congress member’s attention? Isn’t that something only wealthy donors and Washington lobbyists can manage?

Hardly. Remember, Congress is there to represent you. For our system to work, you need to be willing to share your thoughts with members of Congress, and they need to be willing to listen.

In some ways, the easiest step is actually getting in touch. If you call, for instance, it’s unlikely you’ll get your member of Congress right away, but you can certainly pass on a message; most members set aside time each week to call back constituents.
Members also make time on their schedules to meet with constituents, so if you’re going to be in Washington, set up an appointment in advance. It’s even more likely that you’ll be able to schedule a meeting back home, in the district office or even at a local coffee shop, where the distractions of the Capitol are far away.

There are other avenues, too, besides one-on-one conversations. Members regularly hold public meetings in the district, and their times and places are usually listed on the member’s website. Just show up, and don’t hesitate to say what’s on your mind.

Members also hold “virtual forums” now — online discussions in which they and their constituents can share their views. You might also take the bull by the horns and invite your member of Congress to speak to a local group to which you belong; it’s a good way to get a conversation going, and you may feel more comfortable having friends and acquaintances alongside you.

Finally, it is always worth getting to know a member’s staff, either in Washington or in the district. These men and women often have expertise that can resolve your specific problem. If only speaking to your elected official will do, they can help smooth the way.

Once you’re on the phone or face to face with your lawmaker or a staff member, there are certain things you can do that will help you be more credible. Do enough research beforehand to be knowledgeable about the issue, and definitely do not overstate your case or try to mislead. If you can make your case with facts and figures instead of spin, and know the arguments on the other side, you will be far more convincing.

Since you have limited time, be sure to stick to the most important points in your position. Do what you can to be as personal as possible: Explain how a given issue will affect you or your family, and if you can, appeal to your member’s own experience or background to make a point.

Finally, mention who else in your community — a church group, labor union, neighborhood association — shares your views, especially if they’re from a different background or hold different ideological beliefs from you.

Perhaps the most important advice I can give, though — and I speak from experience — is that how you say it is as important as what you say. It helps to be constructive, to find a way not only to raise a problem but then help your legislator find a way to solve it. It’s important to listen as well as to speak — to learn more about your lawmaker’s position and gain some insight into how this issue might be playing in Congress.

Be patient, since some issues demand time for deliberation and consultation before your legislator can give you a commitment, and be unfailingly courteous; knowing how to disagree without being disagreeable is the surest way I know to earn an elected official’s respect.

Above all, be open to compromise. Making some progress toward your goal is better than none at all.
And finally, relax! Say what you want to say, and enjoy your exchanges with your representative. We live in a democracy, and my experience has been that participating in it is both a privilege and a pleasure. I hope that’s what you discover, too.

Audio Version

Why You Need to Know What Congress is Doing

Even at the best of times, it's hard to know what Congress is up to. Its rules are complicated. The words and phrases that House and Senate members use to describe the particulars of legislating seem arcane. Even the bills they write are tricky to follow, what with their instructions to strike this line or that paragraph in some previous law and replace it with new language.

Still, when Congress is functioning as it should, it only takes a little effort and some basic knowledge to follow its workings.

Not at the moment, though. Congress has become an opaque and secretive institution. This is a dangerous and troubling development for a democracy.

In essence, longstanding procedures have been changed with an eye toward centralizing power and making it much more difficult for those not in their inner circle — including many members of Congress, the press, and ordinary Americans — to see what they're doing.

Just for comparison, congressional scholar Norman Ornstein points out that during the 1960s and '70s, Congress averaged 323 days in session; even the lower 278-day average in the 1980s and '90s was still three-quarters time. By that standard, this Congress looks like a bunch of temp workers.

Congressional leaders, more and more, are restricting the free flow of information for the purpose of developing legislation. This is handy for them, because it allows them to write bills without the messiness of open debate. But it's not a very good deal for the American people, because it also makes it nearly impossible for voters to hold their elected representatives accountable for their actions.

These days, key legislative decisions are often made behind closed doors. Committees used to be where the action was: where expert witnesses could give their opinion, where rank-and-file members of Congress could weigh in, where legislation got shaped. Now, committees too often just give a formal stamp of approval to measures that have already been crafted by congressional leaders, their staffers, lobbyists, and administration officials.

As the House worked on an important "bankruptcy reform" bill, for instance, congressional leaders overseeing the process rejected any amendments to a Senate version that had been developed with the help of the credit industry. As congressional scholars Tom Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote, "Actively seeking to prevent any deliberative process, the leaders of the House and Senate obtained a law — but one that was filled with holes and problems, many easily anticipated."

Why does this matter? I think the answer lies in the words from Alexander Hamilton that are carved into the House chambers, words that every member of the House can see: "Here, Sir, the people govern." Our nation rests on the belief that we, Americans of every stripe and belief, have the final say on whether we approve or disapprove of what our representatives and our government are doing in our name.

Yet how can we judge and weigh their actions if we don't know what they're doing? Our system depends on informed voters making discriminating decisions, and this means not just seeing the final product, but also being able to understand and even weigh in on its shaping.

Democracy thrives on information; secrecy is its enemy. Secrecy limits the informed consent of the people, and increases ignorance concerning public issues. It reduces our capacity to act wisely. If the facts about the need for a proposed policy, its cost, and its probable consequences are kept from the public, then democracy is threatened. The less people know, as information is withheld from them, the more suspicious and cynical they become.

This does not mean that every discussion needs to take place in front of the television cameras. There is a place in a democracy for politicians to do what we expect of them — that is, to discuss issues freely, strive to accommodate one another's points of view, and arrive at a consensus that works for the American people as a whole.

But that is not what has been happening over the past several years. The regular order of the traditions of the Congress has been subverted. Too many key decisions are being made in secret.

The truth is, process matters in government. What is called the "regular order" in Congress — the cumbersome steps designed to ensure that legislation gets discussed and examined, that all relevant information flows freely in the process, and that members have a chance to negotiate and compromise — all this developed because it is the best way for people from different regions who hold different beliefs to be part of governing.

Which means that the solution to Congress's growing furtiveness is not at all radical; it's simply a return to what used to be. If decisions are once again made in committee and on the floor, if members of Congress can offer amendments in public and see them debated in public, then not only will Congress have gone a long way toward restoring its transparency, but also the American people will once again have a national legislature they can understand and trust.

Audio version

Compromise Keeps Our System Running

When former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay resigned his congressional seat in June, he gave a widely reported speech defending his no-holds-barred approach to legislating. "It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades our public debate," DeLay declared, "but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle. For true statesmen, Mr. Speaker, are not defined by what they compromise, but what they don't."

I sat up and took notice when I saw that comment, because I was in the midst of reading a history of the House of Representatives that stood in sharp contrast to the attitude exemplified by Mr. DeLay. The book is by the prize-winning historian Robert Remini, who is now the official Historian of the House, and is called "The House: The History of the House of Representatives."

One theme that emerges time and again in this definitive history is that over the past two centuries, compromise has been key to the proper functioning of the body to which DeLay was bidding farewell — not an afterthought, not a talking point to be trotted out at politically opportune moments, not a strategic gambit to be dismissed by the ideologically pure, but part and parcel of what has made Congress a great institution.

In fact, without compromise, we might not even be a nation. The first session of Congress, which was charged with setting up the government merely outlined in the Constitution, likely would have failed badly without the willingness of its members to work in a "spirit of mutual concession," as one observer put it at the time.

As they drew up ways to finance the new government, create federal departments and craft a Bill of Rights, our first legislators were forced to confront one another's regional differences, varied personal beliefs and sometimes antagonistic political agendas.

As Remini writes, "The members disagreed at times, and even quarreled, but never to the point of creating irreconcilable factions within the House. This cooperation and harmony...was essential in the beginning. The members knew it, and therefore worked together to provide a proper start to this 'new experiment in freedom'." If various groups of them had rejected compromise they would have failed, and not only would European powers have tried to take control of American affairs, but building a government based on the principles they'd fought for would have proven impossible.

Compromise is often thought of as the easy way out, especially by those who insist that the only gutsy and honorable thing to do is to stand on principle. Yet surely one of the most courageous moments in U.S. Senate history was the speech given by Daniel Webster in 1850, urging compromise on a series of questions that separated Southern and abolitionist senators and that threatened to destroy the Union. Webster knew that he would be excoriated not just by his constituents in Massachusetts, but by his supporters throughout the northern states, yet he believed that preserving the Union took precedence over his own views

"In highly excited times," he reflected later, in a sentiment that we might do well to remember today, "it is far easier to fan and feed the flames of discord, than to subdue them; and he who counsels moderation is in danger of being regarded as failing in his duty to his party."

At the end of the day, the responsibility we have placed upon our politicians is to make the country work — not to satisfy their own, partisan outlooks on the world. Over the course of the past two centuries, Congress has compiled an admirable record in this regard, from rural electrification to workplace safety to safe foods to federal highways to land-grant colleges to civil rights legislation to... Well, you get the idea.

These and other pieces of landmark legislation did not spring full-blown out of the heads of ideologues. They were the result of men and women rolling up their sleeves and sitting down together to find common ground and perform the sometimes agonizingly difficult work of giving up cherished notions in order to achieve progress.

As Remini puts it in summing up those two centuries of legislating, "Much of the good that has occurred resulted from the fact that individuals of opposing positions agreed to accommodate one another in order to achieve important goals for the benefit of the American people."

He then adds some words that put moments like the present into perspective: "It will take especially strong leadership and determination on the part of many individuals to end the partisan rancor that now exists and restore what has been lost. But it can be done. Intense partisanship is not new to the Congress. It existed in the past and was vanquished. It will again." I believe that he's right.

Audio Version