US House Limits Constituent Emails

Plechazunga passes along this note from The Hill: "The House is limiting e-mails from the public to prevent its websites from crashing due to the enormous amount of mail being submitted on the financial bailout bill. As a result, some constituents may get a 'try back at a later time' response if they use the House website to e-mail their lawmakers about the bill defeated in the House on Monday in a 205-228 vote."

Dear Constituent (a letter from your government)

Dear Constituent,

We know you are a human being, or at least you believe that matters to us, but sadly, our mailboxes are too small and cannot possibly handle the number of emails you people wish to send. We lose them anyway and we never read them so why bother. Also, when we built the mailboxes, we only anticipated hearing from 0.001% of our constituents, not this whopping 1.02% contact ratio we're experiencing!

We have assessed the situation and believe that you fall under one of the following categories:

1. You are whining about something that we did to hurt your feelings.
2. You want us to do something.
3. You have a complaint.

Here are some generic responses to help you cope:

Category #1: (You are whining about something that hurt your feelings.)
Sorry. Vote for me in 2008!

Category #2: (You want us to do something.)
We are already doing everything we can. KTHXBYE. Vote for me in 2008!

Category #3: (You have a complaint.)
GTFO. Canada is that way -------> Vote for me in 2008!

Therefore, while we will gladly take your taxes from you, we have some bad news. We can't hear you. La la la la la la la la what? can't hear you! la la la la la...

No no... that's all you have to say.

Besides, we'll do whatever we want to anyway.

Vote for me in 2008!

Kind Regards,
Your Douchebag Government

Re:Dear Constituent (a letter from your government

GTFO. Canada is that way ------->

Dude, you must be lost - that's the way to Mexico.

Re:Dear Constituent (a letter from your government

The way my laptop is oriented, the direction is right on.

Re:Dear Constituent (a letter from your government

Are you Canadian by any chance ? I am in Canada and if I follow that arrow for a really long time I'll end up right back where I am.

How freakin' cool is that ? As you said, spot on!

Re:Dear Constituent (a letter from your government

F@#$, that's my problem. No wonder the Canada I found looks a lot like Mexico.

Re:Dear Constituent (a letter from your government

To be fair, he did vote against it. Personally I think that's the wrong vote to make since something drastic needs to be done.

This reminds me of a slashdot sig I once saw:
The government: Something must be done, this is something, it must be done.
I will agree that something needs to be done. I don't think that the deal they had was it though.

Congress has been Slashdotted

Subject says it all!

Re:Congress has been Slashdotted

Complete awesomeness!!!

I'd like to see Congress and the Senate Slashdotted handily for every bill up for a vote, well at least the really big ones. I don't really care if the bill is just about congressional medals or something similar.

When it becomes common in the House and Senate for a legislator to take the floor and start off by saying "my constituents have been very clear on this matter via email and telephone..... I vote xyz" then we might consider that we have representative government.

Re:Congress has been Slashdotted

"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion"
    - Edmund Burke

I would not want to live in a world where representatives vote solely based on the opinions of their most vocal (and therefore usually most extreme) constituents. It's bad enough that most of them allow themselves to be so influenced by their most generous contributors.

I have never been more proud to be a republican...

then I have this week. And by republican i mean REAL republican, not a neo-con like in recent years. Regardless of the fact that some house republicans were going to vote for it, it was enough in the end that an individual's ego made them stick to their principles.

Re:I have never been more proud to be a republican

Agreed. I consider myself a Goldwater republican, but it's gotten to the point where people ask my affiliation, I mumble something about being a Libertarian and change the subject.

Good on the House Republicans...

Re:I have never been more proud to be a republican

Libertarians smoke pot.

Well..

Republicans want into your bedroom. Democrats want into your wallet. Libertarians want neither.

Yet another win for open government!

I would like to take this chance to encourage everyone to support groups working towards open government, from Black Box Voting [slashdot.org] to Verified Voting [verifiedvoting.org], and everything in between.

The government is supposed to work for us; until we limit how often lobbyists talk to them, what right do they have to limit how much we talk to them?

Think they read them anyway?

Given that they're all probably receiving thousands of e-mails asking them to reject the bailout, I doubt they're really doing much with them. I'd actually be surprised even you get the standard form-letter reply if they're so overwhelmed.

But I think the overall message is clear. It's not a cacophony, it's thousands of people singing the same message: reject the bailout or we'll reject you in a few weeks!

Ultimately, they're doing the worst possible thing right now, which is preserving the hope of a bailout. This leads to a further credit freeze, because banks won't sell their troubled assets at the (very low) market price because there's still the possibility that they'll be getting a much better price from Uncle Sam.

If you want to free up credit again, we really need one of the presidential candidates to stand up and say, "There will be no bailout." That will force banks to start doing transactions again. Some might go under, but that's OK. We just need to end this idea that a bailout might happen, because right now that uncertainty is what is preventing people from liquidating their assets.

--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]

Re:Think they read them anyway?

If you want to free up credit again, we really need one of the presidential candidates to stand up and say, "There will be no bailout." That will force banks to start doing transactions again. Some might go under, but that's OK. We just need to end this idea that a bailout might happen, because right now that uncertainty is what is preventing people from liquidating their assets.

There are at least 4 Presidential candidates that have stood up and said no to the bailouts (Nader, Baldwin, Barr and McKinney). They also called for the Federal Reserve to be audited. It is just too bad none of them are taken seriously.

I also find it funny that the FED pumped into the financial system almost $700 billion last week and $630 billion yesterday, yet the mainstream press focuses on the "bailout" bill as if that money is really going to do anything. The fact of the matter is the "bailout" bill goes far beyond giving out $700 billion. It is essentially making the treasury/FED a 4th branch of government.

Re:Think they read them anyway?

There's probably some noise from wall street types saying 'bail us out'. But, yeah, the bailout is completely ridiculous so the vast majority are against it. Aside from the companies that made bad investments and will go bankrupt (good), the thing the say they are worried about is liquidity drying up. Lets look at this by analogy... I think this is fairly accurate:

Say you have a $10,000 credit limit on your credit card. Due to the economy the company is concerned if you can repay, so they reduce your limit to $1,000. That's fine if you pay off your debt every month, but if you already have $6000 on it then you are completely screwed -- you have to pay $5k on your next month's bill, and you obviously don't have it.

So the Paulson plan is basically to buy off that $5k of debt so companies don't just go bankrupt right away.

Ok, well that's dumb because those companies are operating in the red anyway. They aren't healthy companies making profits, so they are just going to deficit spend again once some of their debt is lifted off. Instead, the lenders should rewrite the mortgages, either by the government leaning on them or by mandate... take the amount people owe on a mortgage and let them pay it over twice as many years, make it fixed rate, etc. Then the bailout can be paying lenders part of the difference.

Problem solved for homeowners (who eventually refinance into a shorter mortgage once prices come back), problem solved for banks, problem solved for everything derivative from mortgages.

Tell me where I'm wrong.

Yes, OK

A bank "going under" does not take all the depositors' money with it. If bankrupt, the bank is given time to reorganize and recover intact. If sold or taken over, assets, which include bank accounts, investments, and deposits, are sold to another company which will maintain the customers. There is also FDIC and other regulations in place to ensure you'll get your money back unless you did something stupid.

The days of "sorry, no money, we're closed" are gone (unless we suffer a vast & total meltdown of our economy, which is still far off).

Re:Yes, OK

Exactly... banks should be allowed to fail, just like any other business. The deposits are protected anyway.

I love the way they're trying to say that banks will stop lending money. That's how they *make* money - a debt to us is a credit to the bank - the more loans they have the more asseets they have to play around with (provided they're loans to people who can pay them back.. but if a bank is loaning to someone who can't pay they didn't do their due dilligence and deserve everything they get).

How lobbying works

I don't know about how email lobbying works, but I've been involved in lobbying campaigns before. When you call a representative's office, you tell them you're for or against the bill in question and say which way you want them to vote on it. The operator say "OK, I'll let him know." They then count the number of people calling in on either side of the issue, and pass that info on to the representative. Of course you can't send bribes by phone, so whether or not this is effective is open to debate.

I think it's interesting that what is normally a dry subject is generating so much public interest. I'm glad to see the American public sitting up and taking notice of important things for a change instead of just vegetating in front of reality TV and celebrity gossip while politicians try to take money out of the public's pockets to cover their own failure to properly regulate the finance industry. Maybe there's hope for American democracy yet.

From the other side

I've been involved both in lobbying and in a Congressional (House) office (as an unpaid intern). Constituent contacts really do matter: a significant fraction of the staff's time is spent reading and distilling these letters for the Congress(wo)man. On this issue, the letters are nearly universally against the rescue package, which is the only reason Congress went against the opinions of the vast majority of economists (my favorite is Paul Krugman [nytimes.com]) to vote down this bill. If you think your voice doesn't matter to your Congressman, you're crazy, even though (s)he won't always agree.

I know this is hard to believe, but direct bribes don't work. Organizing large numbers of constituents to call/email a Congressman does often work, largely because it demonstrates that you could also organize voters to challenge the Congressman at the ballot box. (That kind of organization takes money, so if anyone wants to consider that a bribe, fine; I consider it democracy.) However, an office will get tens or hundreds of copies of the same form letter from large numbers of constituents; those identical letters count less (though not hugely less) than personally written letters or phone calls.

(As of 4 years ago, when I interned in DC, phone calls, emails, faxes, and snail-mail letters count equally, but snail-mail letters take multiple weeks to get to the DC office because of anthrax-related security. Letters from in-state but out-of-district are read but carry less weight than contacts from constituents and are unlikely to get a response; letters from out-of-state or without a name and mailing address go straight to the recycling bin.)

Patently Unconstitutional on its Face!

What part of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does Congress not understand? The current situation is a "redress of grievances" to the average citizen.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Re:Be like McCain, phone it in.

Most of the Congressmen I've called within the past week have gone to voicemail, which is full of course.

Re:Yeah...

Oh please. I'm no fan of the government, but they're not in a position to just "fix" the problems with the economy, and they don't really need Joe Sixpack's crap advice piling up.

Of all the coverage I've seen on the current problems, hardly any of it actually hits the real roots of the issue. The 700,000,000,000 bailout is being pushed (hilariously) not because anyone who knows really thinks it'll solve the problem, but because the people who are pushing it know it will be perceived that way, and calm down the markets.

The whole issue revolves around the new FAS regulation from a year ago (157, if anyone cares) which required the banks to revalue their investment holdings based on the daily current market values, which, due to a current housing market glut, are tanking. In the long term most of these assets have a much higher (and more stable) value, but since they're being measured in the short term, these horrible reports are coming out and scaring the shit out of everyone.

Frankly, having the government snap up a chunk of semi-stable investments which, in all likelihood, will render an eventual profit isn't a bad deal if it will get all the goddamn market amateurs to stop having hourly shit-hemorrhages.

But all the average scmuck knows about the situation is that the government is going to "throw away" 700bil on something that will (depending on their view) save/destroy the economy. They've got no idea, no more than the better informed people who are pushing it, and their attempts to get in the way are just causing problems.

To use an IT metaphor; the mainframe has eaten itself, and you're trying to fix it, and you've got to do things that may or may not destroy data, but that have to be done regardless just to get the system running again. Is it productive to listen to all the people who have a stake in the data screaming their uninformed opinions? Not really. I think Congress is displaying a distinct lack of tact, but I've been known to tell a CFO to go fuck themselves sideways a time or two myself, and I'm finding it hard to blame them.

Re:Yeah...

The underlying problem is, house prices are *way* over-inflated. Inflation-adjusted, they peaked at *double* the historical norm, and all this mess started when they came back down just 10-30% (regional). There is a generation of people who honestly believe that house prices don't go down, and have made grave mistakes in their personal finances as a result. Nation-wide, house prices above about 3x the median hosehold income aren't sustainable, and we're still about 5x (and of course far worse in the housing bubble cities).

While there were certainly a subset of loans that were just bad - forged docs, impossible payments, etc, and that's what's causing this month's crisis, the problem is much deeper. There's an entire culture now of buying a house with a mortgage payment of 80%+ of your take-home pay, counting on cashing out equity every year because "house prices only go up". This isn't a problem the government can fix.

Sure, the governement needed to intervene to avoid a market panic, but really it just needed to "make a market" in these mortgage-backed securities, to allow them to trade at a value not absurdly depressed by that panic. That's not a $700B bailout, that's just splitting the difference between buyer and seller.

Long term, however, house prices are certain to fall back to sustainable levels, and anyone thinking "we just need to put this problem behind us so house prices can start rising again" is in a dream world. The governement isn't going to solve that problem, and shouldn't try. Do the minimum to stop the panic, and get out.