Republicans Are Robocalling Congress

There’s a story you might have missed in The Hill which really lays bare the lengths Republicans are willing to go to in order to discredit the impeachment inquiry against President Trump.

You can read the entire story here but the crux of the matter is as follows

The RNC paid for about 11,000 calls to almost three dozen House Democrats to influence public opinion on the impeachment inquiry and clog the representatives’ phone lines…. Officials signaled the calls were automated and the goal was to jam the Democrats’ phone lines.

Now, here at Resistbot we know a thing or two about encouraging civic activism. Our mission, since the moment of our launch, has been to faithfully and conveniently allow constituents to communicate with their elected officials. Unlike the RNC, which only connected constituents who opposed the impeachment inquiry, Resistbot does not and never has restricted who we’ll connect to elected officials on the basis of politics.

We have a political viewpoint, sure, but we believe there’s a moral responsibility to allow legislators to hear from all of their constituents, not just the ones we happen to agree with.

Moreover, we believe that the goal of any correspondence with your government must be to communicate ideas, not to deliberately sabotage the communications systems that officials rely upon to communicate with constituents. Sure, there were times when our message volume knocked over Ted Cruz’s fax system and that was hilarious, but we responded to that by leaving the fax line free and instead delivering over 100,000 letters to Senator Cruz’s office by mail at our own expense.

We did that because we believe in the system and in democracy. We believe that our elected officials really do want to listen to their constituents on the issues they care about. We believe that if we can make the process easy, transparent, and reliable enough we can build a better democracy and a better America.

Meanwhile Republicans seem to believe that they’re best served by a smokescreen of cherry-picked viewpoints deliberately orchestrated into a massive denial of service attack upon Democratic members of Congress.

If you believe that’s wrong or if you believe it’s the right thing to do, you should write your Representatives and Senators about it. We won’t tell you what to write because we don’t believe that’s our place and we’ll deliver your message no matter what you have to say on the subject. And we promise that doing so won’t keep other constituents from voicing their opinions.

Because that’s what it means to believe in democracy.

To contact your members of Congress, send the word Resist to Resistbot on Facebook Messenger, Telegram, or as a Twitter direct message. If none of those work for you, Resistbot also supports old fashioned SMS: text RESIST to 50409 to get started. It takes 2 minutes to be heard. 👊🤖