I was inspired by David Frankle’s Quora answer on how to do more for Net Neutrality, so I decided to try a similar tactic on the Republican tax bill. Coming from Vermont, I was especially worried about the addition in the Senate version that gets rid of Obamacare’s individual mandate.

I did the same thing that David did, and started by calling my rep, Peter Welch’s office to ask whether the Congressman could oppose the tax bill. I had a nice conversation with his staffer, who told me that since the bill had passed both the Senate and the House, it was now in a reconciliation period to sort through the differences between the two versions. I asked him what this meant, and he said there would be a conference with representatives from both chambers. This was good news! Since the Senate version got rid of the individual mandate and the House version did not, now was the perfect time to advocate for Obamacare. He told me that unfortunately, since the Congressman was not on the Ways and Means Committee and would not be attending the conference, there was probably not much he could do at this point.

I decided to call all of the congresspeople who would be attending the conference and urge them to leave the individual mandate out of the final version of the tax bill. I would also mention a few other points I opposed as well, like gutting the Johnson amendment (that keeps politics out of the pulpit), and the tuition waiver deductions (since I am a college student considering grad school).



I would use the same advocacy platform that David used, PurplePatriot. Because it lists congressional committees in easy-to-call lists, I hoped it would also list the House conference committee for the tax bill and save me the trouble of Googling each member and typing in the phone number manually for each phone call. I was disappointed to find it didn’t list the conference committee members, so I sent them a quick email to see if they could throw together an ad-hoc call list for me with all fourteen committee members. I would do it the old-fashioned way in the meantime. To my surprise, they replied to my email before I had made even the first call and it was done! Thanks, PurplePatriot.

I started by calling Congressman Devin Nunes’ office and would work my way down the list. I used the same basic call script that David provided in his Quora answer:

“Hi, I’m Teddy, calling from Vermont. I know Congressman Nunes doesn’t represent me directly, but I saw that he’s attending the reconciliation conference on the tax bill — I wanted to reach out to urge him to keep the individual mandate out of the final version of the bill.”

The staffer told me that he didn’t know the Congressman’s current stance on the issue (he also didn’t seem to know that the House version of the bill didn’t include the individual mandate rider), but he did say that the Congressman would hear my comments and take them into consideration.

A staffer named Coleman in John Shimkus’ office gave me a little bit more detail: They use a computer software, he said, that tallies the issues and stances people take when they call. And constituent calls are given more weight, but out of district calls are also included in a brief given to the Congressman at the end the day.

This was good news! I was starting to feel like my phone calls might actually make a difference going into this reconciliation conference. I called and spoke to staffers in all fourteen congresspeople’s offices after only 90 minutes, and that was an hour and a half well spent. Coleman in particular seemed to empathize with my position as a college student looking ahead at grad school when we talked about the tuition waiver, and I really felt like my voice was being heard. If more people called out of district instead of only calling their own representatives, maybe we could make more of a change as active citizens.

After all, Congress’ approval rating is down to 13%, but about half of people approve of the job their congressperson is doing. So let’s start taking more action with the 434/435 of Congress that we don’t approve of instead of just calling the 1/435 of Congress that we do approve of. Out of district calls matter less, yes, but they are heard, and if enough people call maybe our whispers will outweigh the shouts of their constituents.