Letters and Future Letters

Today the office printed off response letters to many of the people who called in about the ACES bill. The letters were in response to their perspective of Pro, Con or Neutral. Keep in mind that these were responses ONLY to the people who are without an email or those who indicated that they preferred an actual, physical written response. The stack of letters that we were mailing out was incredible; without a doubt it was even larger than the actual ACES bill was (that is a joke, as the ACES Bill was over 1,000 pages long itself)

We didn't even make a minor dent in the folding, stuffing and sealing of the huge pile of letters. One reason (besides the volume) why we're not making better progress in getting these important communications out is because the AARP auto calls increased significantly today. You'll remember from my previous posts that they have started a member campaign that auto-connects when opted by the recipient, to our office.

The good news is that the volume of phone calls today were not as heavy as all the calls that we received during the peak of the ACES consideration, but it wasn't too far off. I know that I personally was not able to get too much work done besides answering constituent phone calls. In between all the Health Care concerns were a few H.R. 1080 calls otherwise known as the ROAM Act of 2009 or the pro-non-slaughtering horse bill, which the Congressman has announced his support of by the way.

I also made several trips over the Rayburn building during the mid-morning. I was supposed to deliver materials to either a staffer or the Congressman during a Financial Services Committee meeting, but as luck would have it, I believe it was pushed back due to votes (I'm not a 100% sure why it hadn't started so don't hold me to it).

Then, about half an hour later I received a call from the staffer I was supposed to drop the memo off to. I found myself running to pick up several letters for the Congressman to sign in a staffers room adjacent to the Committee room. It appears to be a good environment for Members and Staffers to escape the high energy out in the halls. After a staffer back in my office was able to get the Congressman to sign the letters, I was able to run the letters back to the Committee's office room where they would take over from there to get them sent out.

Finally, it was also the final day for another one of our interns. From now till the end of my summer internship we will be down to only 4 interns. This is the smallest number that its been working in the office since I started here back in late May. We have always had at least 5 interns and at one point we had 6 for a week.

Funny, but I'm already getting worried about how the office will function with fewer interns and as the health care legislation progresses. This should be interesting!