‘Tis The Season to Give Thanks to Your Lawmaker(s’ Staffers)
While you may want to stuff your legislator’s stocking full of coal (not an applicable metaphor for coal lobbyists), think twice before you send bad tidings to their staff.
Congressional staffers work hard. They’re underpaid, they spend long hours toiling away on a bewildering number of issues. Worse than that? They have to deal with us.
By and large, they do so politely and respectfully — the countless cogs in the government machine; the hard-working elves in Santa’s workshop (or non-denominational holiday workshop of your choice) keeping their nose to the grindstone all year so their boss can get the credit for one measly night of delivering the toys over which they tirelessly labored.
Well, you get the idea: Being a Congressional staffer is a pretty thankless job.
But you don’t have to take our elves analogy as the only proof. As Brad Fitch, CEO and President of the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF), noted last year:
“Confessional staff get 20 to 30 percent less than they’d get in the private sector. You go up in management and into the hierarchy of congressional staff and that differential gets much bigger. You have a Senate chief of staff that can walk out the door tomorrow and probably get twice their pay in the private sector.”
And yet, staffers still slog through the thousands of phone calls, voice mails, faxes and handwritten letters (and you thought your inbox was scary). Between 1995 and 2004, messages to Congress quadrupled — reaching 200,388,993 communications in 2004 — and you better believe that in the past ten years, correspondence has only gotten even more overwhelming.
As you might imagine, not every note to Congress contains brilliantly-articulated solutions to all our nation’s greatest challenges — or even a simple suggestion on how a lawmaker should vote on a bill. They hear it all, from requests for visits to the Capitol, to pleas for parking ticket forgiveness, to abusive rants that make the comments section of your local news site appear sane.
Contrary to what you might think, this correspondence actually matters — a lot. Smart elected officials want as much contact with their constituents as they can get. Happy constituents = a higher chance of reelection.
Our constant connectivity, from social media to automated messaging services like our app Countable, have made it easier for everyone to hassle Capitol Hill (sorry, not sorry). While that’s all well and good, almost nothing has been done to help staffers tackle the influx of correspondence.
We’re stepping in this holiday season to try our darndest to make constituent correspondence easier for staff to process, count, and respond to. Send your lawmaker a holiday message, or rather, send their aides a message.
They’re the ones who *really* make our government work, so let them know that you appreciate the effort — even when their bosses don’t vote the way we want them to.
