The Congressman Has Exited the Building

Today the Congressman had a very busy schedule. One LA staffer and he were gone for the majority of the day attending a variety of of meetings and Subcommittee Hearings. I was unable to attend any of the open sessions today due to the continuing high volume of calls, but from what I could tell, everyone is feeling the hectic schedule.

I found out today that one of the Robo-calls that is reaching our constituents is from the Republican National Committee or RNC. This 'polling', as the RNC refers to it, is conducted in such a way as to solicit contact to our office. Although I don't have the precise transcript as to what the message says, yet, I can't imagine a situation where one political organization would use a marketing technique like this that would result in their position to be questioned or undermined by their own message. Its important not to observe that the RNC probably only called people who have in the past been supporters. Please don't misinterpret my observations to suggest that I'm saying that the RNC, or for that matter any organization representing voters, does not have the right to voice their support. I'm sure that those on both sides of political issues use similiar tactics.

What concerns me most is that it is not a productive excercise to just generate calls by auto-connecting constituents who are ill infomed about what they are really calling to protest. It's obvious that the vast majority of these callers only know the specific lead point that the Robo-call message told them to say. That message of course was to call and 'just say no' to Obama's health care plan.

To me it seems that the result of such Robo-calling undermines the true value and intent of the First Amendment.The manipulation of constituent voice has become a very troubling issue to me today.