By SHAWN ZELLER, JONATHAN MILLER and TOM CURRY

CQ ROLL CALL

It’s now well known in Washington that on Feb. 4, police escorted GOP Rep. Tom McClintock, a fifth-term libertarian whose district stretches from the Sacramento suburbs to Yosemite National Park, out of a town hall meeting full of angry constituents in Roseville, Calif., 30 miles northeast of the state capital. The calls of activists opposed to President Donald Trump rained down: “This is what democracy looks like!”

Less than a week later, activists ambushed another Republican representative also starting his ninth year in Congress, Jason Chaffetz, at a town hall in a high school auditorium in suburban Salt Lake City. “Do your job!” they yelled at the Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman, demanding that he investigate Trump’s conflicts of interest.

The drama continued over the week-long Presidents Day congressional recess. A 7-year-old queried GOP Sen. Tom Cotton, pointedly, about Trump’s plan for a border wall. Other Republicans, like Northern Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, were pilloried for declining to host town halls.

But Republicans aren’t the only ones angry liberals are thrashing. On Jan. 29, activists spurred on by social media posts from the progressive Working Families Party showed up en masse for a spaghetti dinner put on by Sheldon Whitehouse in a Providence middle school auditorium. These events are normally sleepy affairs in liberal Rhode Island, and Whitehouse, who faces re-election for a third Senate term representing the Ocean State next year, is a loyal Democrat. He has maintained a record of voting 95 percent or more of the time with his party on votes that split Republicans and Democrats in his 10 years in Congress.

Still, Whitehouse voted in January to confirm former Kansas GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo as CIA director, and to the activists, that was appeasement. “We are going to hold Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse accountable,” said one, featured in a YouTube video of the rally. Pompeo, the activist argued, subscribes to a worldview that pits Christians against Muslims, believes the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden should be executed for treason and refuses to condemn Trump’s proposal to kill the families of accused terrorists.