On April 14th, Democracy for America and True Majority had a National Day of Action opposing Social Security privatization. I heard about it at the Democracy for Texas meeting a week beforehand and decided to go on a Congressional office visit to Rep. Michael McCaul of District 10.
The field office director, Victoria Miller, and the Social Security caseworker, Thomas Brown, both attended the meeting.
The group ended up being about 8-10 constituents, including a couple of young folks, a number of retired folks, and a few in between. There was even a gentleman who isn't eligible for Social Security because he was a teacher, but had been raised by a widowed mom who depended on Social Security for part of her income after the dad died.
The group leader was just an individual, apparently drafted by DFT when he signed up. He did a great job of contacting everyone a couple of days ahead of time and giving us an overview of what would happen. The main instructions for presentation was to focus on personal stories, and not to turn it into a political demonstration. He didn't really provide much more framing advice than that, and even when I dug around on the DFA site I didn't find much more. But to my pleasant surprise, everyone stayed on topic and didn't rant - so it turned out to have a very "concerned citizen" tone that I think carried across well.
Ms. Miller was very diplomatic in her listening skills, and told us it was pretty striking that we had people in the group who weren't eligible for Social Security or were so far away from receiving it. I had anticipated a colder response since at first the staff kept calling us "the group from Democracy for Texas." But we had done many of the right things - a sign-in sheet with all of our addresses to show we were constituents, respectful tone, etc., and I think it helped.
Several of us had followed the group leader's advice and prepared written versions of our comments, which Ms. Miller said was the most important thing we could have done aside from showing up. They send a packet to the D.C. office once per week that includes constituents' letters, and Ms. Miller said that Rep. McCaul reads them all personally even though the staff prepares summaries.
We didn't get any feedback on the Representative's position, despite the group leader's question about that. Ms. Miller did mention that if Rep. McCaul was voting, it was good for him to have a 3-inch binder full of his constituents' views that supported his vote.
Both Ms. Miller and Mr. Brown passed out their business cards to everyone in the group and urged us repeatedly to contact the office with our views at any time. Given some of the stories I heard out of the last Texas Legislative session (about various legislators telling their constituents to stop calling about this or that issue), I definitely appreciated their courtesy and respectful tone.
All in all, it was nowhere near as stressful as I thought, since it was a well-organized group excursion rather than a solo gig. I highly recommend participating in something like this in the future.
