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More Than 200 Republicans in Congress Are Skipping February Town Halls with Constituents
VICE News reports on Feb 16:
Members of Congress are set to return to their districts this weekend for their first weeklong recess since Donald Trump's inauguration. Heading home during legislative breaks is nothing new, but this year most Republicans are foregoing a hallowed recess tradition: holding in-person town halls where lawmakers take questions from constituents in a high school gym, local restaurant, or college classroom.
After outpourings of rage at some early town halls--including crowds at an event near Salt Lake City yelling "Do your job!" at Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee--many Republicans are ducking in-person events altogether. Instead they're opting for more controlled Facebook Live or "tele-town halls," where questions can be screened by press secretaries and followups are limited--as are the chances of becoming the next viral meme of the Left.
For the first two months of the new Congress, the 292 Republicans have scheduled just 88 in-person town hall events--and 35 of those sessions are for Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, according to a tabulation conducted by Legistorm. In the first two months of the previous Congress in 2015, by contrast, Republicans held 222 in-person town hall events.
[...] "What happens in politics is that over time, you can get increasingly insulated from people that have a strongly held point of view that's different [from yours]", [said Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina]. Sessions like tele-town halls aren't a good substitute, he said, because "oftentimes they will screen their calls and those forums can be manipulated".
Republicans who get [verbally] roughed up at their town halls have taken to dismissing the attendees as professional organizers. [...] While there is no evidence of paid protesters attending town halls, it is true that Democratic activists have been organizing to manufacture viral moments of confrontation like the tea party movement did in the summer of 2009.
[...] One strategy for activists has been to host their own town halls and invite their representatives to attend. [...] Another method has been to confront senators and representative in public places and demand they hold a town hall.
Examples throughout the week at AlterNet and The Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Massachusetts.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @04:22PM
Exactly. You lost. Deal with it like a grown-up.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 25 2017, @04:58PM
We ALL lost, you stupid motherfucker. This isn't some stupid football game; this is the nation's very character and soul under attack.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday February 25 2017, @05:39PM
> the nation's very character and soul
While the overwhelming majority of Americans are decent people, the "character and soul" of the nation itself has been really shady from the day the first immigrants came in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @09:55PM
Keeping in mind, of course, that all humans are immigrants to the Americas. It's all just a question of how much earlier some of our ancestors got here than others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @02:29AM
Perhaps super-bob didn't immigrate here but instead hatched from an egg.
This way he is the only native and all the native Americans as well as my grand parents and yours are all immigrants needing deported, even the dead ones.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Saturday February 25 2017, @05:41PM
I would say that has been true since George W. Bush was president. We used to be the good guys, and all of a sudden we were torturing people and invading Iraq because reasons. Wall Street vaporized the Middle Class and Congress and the Whitehouse and the media helped them do it. They built the most fearsome police state in history, and track and profile every person on Earth in the most minute way, and instead of hanging all of them and burning Washington DC to the ground and salting the earth, people say, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."
The media is trying to whip everyone up into a frenzy and put it all on Trump because they know they vaporized their own credibility during this last election. They're desperate to stay relevant. They're terrified because the President of the United States called them "enemies of the United States," and virtually no one is leaping to their defense. Because they are enemies of the United States.
The other servants of the Deep State behind them, otherwise called Congressmen, are terrified because they are beginning to perceive the convulsive fury of the hoi poloi. They're getting it from Trump supporters and from progressives (whose economic goals overlap in so many ways). How they're responding now, to further withdraw from direct contact with their constituents, is exactly the opposite of what they should be doing. It will further isolate them and alienate them from the people they're supposed to represent. That will accelerate their irrelevance.
If Trump keeps sending these shattering pulses through the system, it won't be long before Trump's victory begins to re-create itself across Congress as incumbents go down. And that's if the reaction stays non-violent, through the electoral system.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @07:30PM
That was the myth and you and many others bought it.
Even before there was a USA, there were Europeans who showed up intent on maximizing profits.
If you were in their way, your lot will be reduced.
They'd steal your stuff, in particular, your land.
If it was easier--and it typically was--they'd just kill you.
When all the easily-gained eastern land was grabbed up, these greedy pale-skinned invaders headed west saying "Manifest Destiny".
When they got to the West Coast and realized there was nothing else on the continent to steal, they started looking elsewhere.
In 1845, USA picked a fight with Mexico and stole a bunch of its land.
In 1853, USAian Commodore Perry sailed a fleet with 61 cannons across the Pacific and into Tokyo Bay where he told the Japanese in no uncertain terms that they would open themselves to trade.
In 1893, the sovereign nation of Hawaii was invaded by USA Marines.
They have never left.
In 1896, it was claimed that the USS Maine had been attacked (though it blew up because of improper coal dust management in its own fuel bunkers).
Yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst used that lie to gin up a war with Spain.
In a couple of years, USA gained control of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and other Pacific islands, and permanently took possession of part of Cuba.
In the 1930s, retired Marine General Smedley Butler wrote "War is a Racket" in which he noted that during his decades of service he had been a thug for USAian businessmen, in particular, in Central America for The United Fruit Company.
In the 1940s, via a naval blockage 10,000 miles from its shores, USA bullied Japan into a war with it.
In 1953, when a democratically elected prime minister moved to nationalize the oil supply in Iran, USA made sure he was deposed and USA installed a tyrant there who brutalized that place until 1979.
In the 1960s, USA once again had to cross thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of miles of ocean to find a place to bomb, invade, and occupy yet again with its imperialist aggression.
In the process it murdered millions of non-combatants and left multiple countries littered with cluster bombs and and poisoned with chemical weapons.
(There wasn't even any particular commodity in Vietnam to be pillaged; USA was just keeping in practice at being a ruthless aggressor.)
Starting in the same era and lasting much longer, USA fomented regime change in Central America and South America, installing USA-friendly butchers there.
In this span of time, Secretary of State and war criminal Henry Kissinger infamously said, “The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer."
In 1989, in another imperialist aggression, USA invaded the sovereign nation of Panama, murdered hundreds of non-combatants, and kidnapped the head of state.
In 2003, based on lies about "WMDs", USA once again bombed, invaded, and occupied a sovereign nation and, once again in pursuit of regime change, went after and kidnapped its head of state yet again to achieve a supply of cheap petroleum.
USA.gov has NEVER been "the good guys".
USA.gov has ALWAYS been a murderous aggressor.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @01:23PM
> That was the myth and you and many others bought it.
Having higher standards always increases the chance that one won’t live up to them.
Its easy to cherry pick failures, but when you portray them as the norm rather than the exception you enable those who want us to have low standards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @07:46PM
If an individual via 2 separate events kills 1 person in each event, cops call that a pattern and use the term "serial killer".
Why a nation gets a free pass for the same behavior--except multiplied by hundreds or thousands or millions of cumulative deaths, I can't understand.
...and, as already noted, General Butler made it clear that in every case the aggression was done in the name of maximizing the profits of a few.
higher standards
Demonstrating that you have drunk the kool-aid adds nothing to the discussion.
It simply shows that you are susceptible to propaganda.
cherry pick failures
The list was only a tiny sampling of aggression by USA.gov.
A full list of overt action would fill volumes.
Add in the covert/proxy actions and you'll need to multiply the bookshelf space needed by an order of magnitude.
Imperialist aggression is what USA.gov does.
It's just that simple.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @02:29AM
White Europeans and their descendants have thousands of years of conquest and war in their blood. woe to the vanquished, motherfucker!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @08:24PM
So far trump has made me over 40k this year.
From betting he would win at 783:1 odds. To the stock market hitting record highs EVERY WEEK!
I'll take more of this losing please.
Yeah that's right. I don't give one fuck about your edge case social issue that includes a whole 1% of the population.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one. You few fuckoff for 8 years. And stfu already.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday February 26 2017, @08:38PM
No :) We're going to hound you to the ends of the earth, then when you die and land in Hell, we'll come visit you and toast marshmallows over your screaming, flailing, writhing, red-hot soul. Cry more, snowflake.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @09:03PM
https://68.media.tumblr.com/f6251497804088ae69f3066479a84037/tumblr_nsmxfqI3bd1qkko3bo1_400.gif [tumblr.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Saturday February 25 2017, @09:41PM
We ALL lost, you stupid motherfucker. This isn't some stupid football game; this is the nation's very character and soul under attack.
Wrong. This election showed what this nation's true character and "soul" really is, and the AC you responded to is a prime example of what true Americans are really like. Sure, there's good people here and there, but much of the population is not, as we're now seeing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @10:31PM
a prime example of what true Americans are really like
That's too depressing to consider.
I would say the results of the election shows how easily humans can be manipulated when they are not presented with a powerful counterpoint to Fascism and Neoliberalism.
In particular, it shows how Lamestream Media, when it isn't properly regulated such that it serves "in the public interest", will only seek to maximize profits via cheap gimmicks and pointing their cameras and microphones at outrageous hucksters.
(Trump got $5B of airtime gratis; the rest, basically zip.)
The founding documents, written before the advent of TeeVee, need an update to account for that powerful medium.[1]
[1] Called a "medium" because it's rare when it is well done.
N.B. As has been true for a LOOOONG time, the best coverage of politics comes from comedians who recorded[2] the appearances of the politicians/wannabes and stopped the playback often to explain/critique what was being said after fact-checking it (something that simply can't be done in real time).
Big props here to Jimmy Dore and his band of sharp-witted skewer-wielders, in particular Mike McRae.
[2] Trump and his minions are so completely full of shit that anyone who airs their stuff live is simply irresponsible.
Every single thing those congenital liars say absolutely has to be fact-checked before airing/publishing any of it.
Treat all other politicians the same as well.
Don't allow their crap to go unchallenged in real time.
The value in political speeches comes from the analysis.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]