ICYMI: What Calling Congress Achieves

Kathryn Schulz of the New Yorker writes:

“Americans vote, if we vote at all, roughly once every two years. But even in a slow season, when no one is resorting to faxes or protests or pizza-grams, we participate in the political life of our nation vastly more often by reaching out to our members of Congress. When we do so, however, we almost never get to speak to them directly. Instead, we wind up dealing with one of the thousands of people, many of them too young to rent a car, who collectively constitute the customer-service workforce of democracy…. According to Bradford Fitch, the President of the Congressional Management Foundation (C.M.F.), a nonpartisan nonprofit group that works to improve the efficacy of interactions between citizens and lawmakers, constituent communications account for twenty to thirty per cent of the budget for every congressional office on Capitol Hill….”

Read more at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/what-calling-congress-achieves