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Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter

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Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter

#61

Post by jbooth »

chrisd82 wrote: post #59
wallawe wrote: post #55

Although I applaud the efforts here, as a former staffer and intern for a congressman, I hate to be the bearer of bad news... The truth is my job as an intern, as was the job of all other interns that I met while in DC, was to take constituent calls and also open constituent mail. However, no information was ever actually relayed to the congressmen. We had a formatted response to each and every issue that the House c…

I know for a fact that many offices explicitly log responses received from constituents based on phone calls/letters they receive. If the phone is ringing off the hook or the office gets inundated with letters, this will undoubtedly make one of the more senior staffers take notice and he should report it up the chain of command. Obviously its all relative but if enough letters/phone calls get placed, the message will…

Yup, everything I've ever heard through the grapevine is that congressmen will notice if they suddenly receive a big volume of calls about something.

Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter

#62

Post by palish »

wallawe wrote: post #55

Although I applaud the efforts here, as a former staffer and intern for a congressman, I hate to be the bearer of bad news... The truth is my job as an intern, as was the job of all other interns that I met while in DC, was to take constituent calls and also open constituent mail. However, no information was ever actually relayed to the congressmen. We had a formatted response to each and every issue that the House c…

Thank you for taking the time and effort to write this. It's rare for us to get a glimpse into "how things actually work".

Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter

#64

Post by loganlinn »

jbooth wrote: post #61
chrisd82 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know for a fact that many offices explicitly log responses received from constituents based on phone calls/letters they receive. If the phone is ringing off the hook or the office gets inundated with letters, this will undoubtedly make one of the more senior staffers take notice and he should report it up the chain of command. Obviously its all relative but if enough letters/phone calls get placed, the message will…

Yup, everything I've ever heard through the grapevine is that congressmen will notice if they suddenly receive a big volume of calls about something.

If only calls were recorded and letters were scanned. Analyzing the trends seems like pretty powerful data for a congressman.

Then again, you could say that the congressman shouldn't need a computer to understand the people he represents.

Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter

#65

Post by ericd »

mikesabat wrote: post #60
epi0Bauqu wrote: post #24

I'd love to send people to this site, but I worry people who have never heard of the bill won't know what is going on. Can you embed the explanation video or point to or something? Edit: I see you just did. Thx! I just linked to it on DuckDuckGo as well as donated and sent my letter. Thanks again.

How insane is it that you have 12k karma, have no problem commenting on js, ruby, jquery, mongo or even css... but you're worried about people not understanding this bill. NOT a comment about you, epi08, but just commentary about what matters. If you haven't called your congressperson about this, then you don't care. period.

Putting a notice on a site trafficked by 10's of thousands per day like DDG is a lot more powerful than calling...

Everyone with a site, please do this. I've put it on PadMapper.

Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter

#66

Post by einhverfr »

wallawe wrote: post #55

Although I applaud the efforts here, as a former staffer and intern for a congressman, I hate to be the bearer of bad news... The truth is my job as an intern, as was the job of all other interns that I met while in DC, was to take constituent calls and also open constituent mail. However, no information was ever actually relayed to the congressmen. We had a formatted response to each and every issue that the House c…

I have, however, had good luck replying to form letters with point-by-point responses citing sources. I suspect that is highly annoying to form-letter pushers.

Re: Tell congress to stop SOPA with a physical letter

#68

Post by learc83 »

loganlinn wrote: post #64
jbooth wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, everything I've ever heard through the grapevine is that congressmen will notice if they suddenly receive a big volume of calls about something.

If only calls were recorded and letters were scanned. Analyzing the trends seems like pretty powerful data for a congressman. Then again, you could say that the congressman shouldn't need a computer to understand the people he represents.

They wouldn't if they only represented the number of people they were supposed to when the constitution was written (house members that is).

However we capped it at 435, so each congressman represents far more people than he is supposed to. I say technology has reached the point where we should remove the cap have thousands of representatives.

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