Never Give Up, Never Surrender

This is a brief reminder that if you only want to talk to your representatives' voicemail, call outside local business hours. (Wherever you live, a congressmember's DC office is on East Coast time). After leaving a lot of messages in the last couple of months, I'd concluded that all my calls would go to voicemail, whether I called during the day or at 1 p.m.

Then one of Rep. Pressley's staffers answered the phone on Tuesday, which threw me off-script for a moment. As far as I know, they're counting calls, and your senator might care where in the state you're calling from, but a call at 7 a.m. or midnight counts as much as one during the day.

I copied most of this from siderea's journal, there's a lot more detail in her post:

AMERICANS WITH DEMOCRAT SENATORS,

tl;dr: call them TODAY, tell them you absolutely expect them to shut down the government by voting against the continuing resolution bill if the GOP doesn't provide massive concessions, and maybe even then.

And whatever position they take, take it to social media immediately and make sure everyone you can reach knows it. Especially if they agree. [I think this assumes you talk to a staffer rather than leaving voivemail.]

There's a script about the CR at 5calls.org, but it says to tell your senator to ask for concessions in the CR, and it doesn't look like any such concessions would be worth much.

Slightly longer explanation:

The GOP has enough votes to pass the CR bill in the House, but will need at least seven Democrats to vote for it for it to pass.

The CR bill is not hugely bad, in and of itself. But if it doesn't pass, the government shuts down.

Shut it down.

The prevaling sentiment on r/fednews – a Reddit sub for federal employees – in favor of a shutdown. "This is the only leverage the Dems have. If they don’t use it we are all toast"

I made these calls because in general, people are more likely to call either to ask for something, or tell the representative why the caller thinks they're wrong about something.

I was looking at 5calls.org today, looking for something I could usefully call state-level representatives about. The entry for fighting mass deportations started with something like, Gov. Healey is doing the right thing, ask your governor to do the same. So I picked up the phone and called Healey's office to thank her for not allowing local law enforcement to carry out this policy, and please stick to that.

I also called Rep. Pressley to state my strong support for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Senator Warren to thank her for her work with that agency. Warren doesn't need a message, canned or otherwise, to remind her that the CFPB is a good thing.