Mandatory town hall meetings in their homestates for congressmen/women?

[rch35]

Has anyone ever heard of an effort to make something like this happen?

Make it mandatory in Congress' rules to have at least one town hall style meeting a month in their homestate where anyone can come in and ask a question, and force greater accountability to the people on your representative.

Thoughts on this idea?

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Who's gonna make 'em do it?

[murielm99]

2. Once a month might be a bit often.

I am curious about this, though.

Our local congressman is having a town hall meeting soon. He is a republican. I am going to bring it up at our next county Democratic meeting. We need to get several people to attend and ask him pointed questions.

This guy used to refuse to have town hall meetings. He never had an email addy unless he was running for office. He is a real dumbbell and he needs to be confronted. I can't figure out why he is having a town hall meeting NOW, unless it is to criticize Obama and to do what he can to make him fail.

[ddeclue]

4. Be CAREFUL how you go about this.

Where do you live?

Who is the Congressman in question?

Republican Congressmen are generally irrelevant to passing or blocking anything in the House right now.

Republican Senators are different story.

If you can do this without making it look like a partisan pile-on that's one thing but if it degenerates into left right bashing and talking points you may come off looking as bad as he does.

The main thing I think for the moment is to kill them with kindness and give them an opportunity to look like obstructionists if they want to obstruct progress because it will cost them in 2010 when they try to get re-elected. If you go after the guy with the proverbial baseball bat though, he may come off as a victim.

Doug D.

[murielm99]

5. My Congressman is Manzullo.

Anyone who knows him knows that he really is stupid. This is not an exaggeration. He was on Rachel Maddow's show recently. Someone posted a clip of it here.

He is holding this meeting from 6-8 p.m. in a couple of weeks. I don't know if he is going to stand in front of a group and speak, or if he intends to answer peoples' questions by speaking to them one-on-one. I am going to call his office and find out so we can plot some sort of strategy.

I am the Democratic county chairman here. His aide called me and asked for a list of our precinct committeemen so she could invite all of us. We all received letters of invitation.

This is odd for a guy who has been allergic to town hall meetings in the past. This guy does not have to worry about being reelected, either. We try to beat him, but this is a very red district. There are many people here who vote for anything that has an R after its name.

[ddeclue]

3. Actually I have been trying to arrange for EXACTLY that very thing

here in Central Florida where our two Senators live in Orlando as well as having four Congressional Districts and I've talked with directors from:

Senator Nelson's office, Senator Martinez' office, Congressman Grayson's office (I know him personally and a lot of his staff since I volunteered on his campaign a great deal), Congresswoman Kosmas' office, and spoke directly with Congressman Mica and Senator Nelson at a recent event about this.

We have three Democratic Congressmen and one Democratic Senator here and one Republican Congressman and one Republican Senator here. It will be hard to get GOP participation though because they think that this is a setup to screw them over.

I approached them originally about this as a surrogate for MoveOn.org since I knew a number of these Democratic electeds through campaigns on which I had worked as a Democratic activist. The MoveOn folks seemed to be clueless as to how to go about this task and had been given a ridiculous training session from national MoveOn which did generic role-playing exercises using fictitious Congressional profiles that bore no resemblance to ANY of our local electeds.

All of these role-playing exercises seemed focused on the notion that this was an adversarial interaction between MoveOn and the prospective Congressman and seemed to be about trying to intimidate them into taking the meeting - a ridiculous way to approach EITHER a Democrat OR a Republican in this situation.

The Democrats are already on our side and need to be approached as already "taking yes for an answer" - with a great deal of respect and without disrupting their normal office operations.

The Republicans while not generally on our side aren't politically suicidal either and are not going to blatantly stand in the way of having some sort of reform. Their approach is most likely going to be "delay and dilute" not outright opposition unless they want to be out on the street after their next election.

The approach to Republicans is to realize that House Republicans are nice to have but unnecessary to passing the reform. Try to get them if possible and be nice about it but don't cave if they don't want to play ball.

The Senate Republicans on the other hand are more crucial because you need to secure a filibuster proof majority - you need to treat moderate GOP Senators as potentially Senator #60 and find out just what they want to pass the bill - in Martinez' case he wants to see people keep their homes out of foreclosure based on what I know at this point.

MoveOn wanted to have a sit down meeting with each of these electeds on very short notice based on an presenting them with the results of an online automated petition process but this is really unreasonable if you know anything about how scheduling works for an elected. I pushed the idea of an "economic town hall" meeting to occur around the March time frame if possible here in the district with most of them (I haven't talked with Corrine Brown's office yet but I will try with an aide I know there).

Kosmas' and Grayson's offices seem to be the most on board with this idea based on those to whom I've already spoken - Congressman Mica (R-FL07) based on my conversation with him is the least favorable and says he does "online" townhall meetings with constituents already but has no time for a live town hall meeting face to face with media and constituents.

The good news is that we've gotten rid of the two most rabid right wing Republicans in our local caucus and replaced them with a moderate (Kosmas) Democrat and a liberal (Grayson) Democrat so that they are much more interested in what ordinary people have to say and the two remaining Republicans (Martinez and Mica) are relatively moderate compared to Cornyn or McConnell or some of the right wing hard core GOP.

If anyone else has any juice to make this happen here in Central Florida please message me so we can discuss it.

Doug D.
Orlando, FL