Fewer members of Congress willing to brave town hall meetings
JIM THORPE, Pa. - They had to leave the protest signs outside. As about 250 people settled into their chairs for a town hall meeting last week with Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.), a staffer laid down the law: No cursing. No noisemakers. No chanting. Please respect others' rights.
JIM THORPE, Pa. - They had to leave the protest signs outside. As about 250 people settled into their chairs for a town hall meeting last week with Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.), a staffer laid down the law: No cursing. No noisemakers. No chanting. Please respect others' rights.
For good measure, five uniformed state troopers patrolled the edges of the oak-floored auditorium at Penn's Peak resort.
As controlled as the situation was, at least Toomey was putting himself in position to take guff.
In Pennsylvania and across the country, many representatives and senators avoided holding the open forums that are traditional fixtures of the August congressional recess, and celebrated rituals of democracy.
Instead, they opted for topic-specific "roundtables" with business and community leaders, jobs fairs, factory tours, and other events closed to the general public.
Who can blame them? A record 87 percent of voters disapproved of Congress in a recent Gallup Poll.
And in recent years, town halls have become stages for activists to shout down opponents and post the battles on YouTube, part of the never-ending struggle for advantage in a confrontational political culture.
In 2009, tea-party supporters, some financed by corporate interests, swarmed town halls to attack Democrats who favored President Obama's health-care overhaul.
This summer, liberal groups and unions have returned the favor, targeting Republican town halls to demand higher taxes on the rich and corporations, and to push for new government spending on jobs in infrastructure and clean-energy technology.
Some cite concerns over security as a factor in the decline of town halls, after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D., Ariz.) was shot in the head at a meet-and-greet event in January. Six people were killed in the gunman's rampage.
A survey by No Labels, a nonprofit group that promotes bipartisan cooperation in government, found that 56 percent of U.S. House members held open town halls during the August recess. The group gave representatives credit for "tele-town halls," in which constituents dial in to a conference call, though skeptics say it is too easy to screen participants.
The number of meetings held by lawmakers declined to about 500 this summer, from 659 in the summer of 2009, according to a database compiled by CQ-Roll Call.
"From a human standpoint, you can understand why people would be reluctant to expose themselves to that kind of abuse, but nobody is drafted into political office," said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who advised President Bill Clinton and cofounded No Labels.
"Public trust in government is at an all-time low, and the sight of elected officials sealing themselves off is not going to help increase it," Galston said.
Freshman Rep. Lou Barletta (R., Pa.) suspended his town halls for the summer after several were disrupted by liberal activists. He said he was concerned about attendees' safety, and mentioned the Giffords shooting in local media interviews.
"During my last town hall meeting, I was about 10 minutes into welcoming remarks when a woman stood up and said, 'When are you going to shut up?' " Barletta, of Hazleton, said Friday. "A few minutes later, an attendee who lives outside the district got into an argument with a constituent, and they argued for more than 10 minutes as other people yelled at one side or the other." Police hustled a protester out of that meeting, as well as a previous one, he said.
Barletta's 10th District in northeastern Pennsylvania is highly competitive, already targeted by Democratic strategists for 2012. The district is one of 13 around the nation that voted Democratic in the last two presidential elections, but elected a Republican to the House last year.
Rep. Patrick Meehan (R., Pa.), whose Seventh District centered in Delaware County voted the same way, was blistered in town halls in the spring over his vote for a GOP budget proposal that would privatize Medicare. An exchange from one such meeting was featured in a recent TV ad against him.
"They can be zoos," Meehan said of open town halls. "They're stages, just settings for political arguments by different interest groups to a certain extent." But he held three forums last Wednesday because, Meehan said, he has a duty to give voters a chance to be heard.
"It's part of the price of being in political office today," he said.
Meehan and his colleague Rep. Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.), of the neighboring Sixth District, spoke after a tour of Hildacy Farm Preserve in Media and a discussion with representatives of the National Land Trust and other environmental groups. Gerlach has written, and Meehan has cosponsored, a bill to extend an expiring tax deduction that encourages landowners to donate property for conservation.
Gerlach has held seven conference calls, with as many as 7,000 people dialing in from around his district to ask questions or listen in. A computer randomly dials phone numbers in the district, he said, and a recording invites residents to participate.
The telephone town halls draw Democrats and independents. "People aren't bashful," Gerlach said. "The real value is that there are more people participating. With the regular town halls, we'd send out the postcards and put notices up, then I'd show up to the township building for the meeting and sometimes there were three people there."
Last Thursday, after finishing his opening remarks in Jim Thorpe, Toomey acknowledged a familiar figure in a red-white-and-blue tie-dyed shirt. "Dan, good to see you again," Toomey said.
Dan Haney, a laid-off Philadelphian, criticized Toomey for meeting with lobbyists and business leaders and asked why he was unwilling to support raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations to attack the deficit. "When are we going to have jobs?" Haney, 53, asked. "When are you going to stand up for us?"
Toomey wouldn't take the bait. "I'm really not going to apologize for meeting regularly with groups of small-business owners, chambers of commerce," he said. "Let's face it, those are the people who are going to hire unemployed workers." Most in the crowd applauded.
But Toomey acknowledged that Haney's view on taxing the wealthy and corporations was "understandable." He blasted tax preferences that enabled General Electric to avoid paying any federal tax in 2010. "That's outrageous," Toomey said.
Haney also confronted Toomey outside a private meeting in Williamsport Aug. 30 and attended the senator's first town hall the next day in Coudersport, near the border with New York state.
Haney, laid off in February from his customer service job with Express Scripts, acknowledged that his traveling expenses are paid by the American Dream Movement, funded by the liberal group MoveOn.org, the AFL-CIO, and others.
"I couldn't afford this on my own," he said. "We want Sen. Toomey to hear our pain. Even if it doesn't change his mind, if we get enough folks out there who hear us . . ."