Since the election, constituents have contacted Congress in unprecedented numbers. Illustration by Oliver Munday / Source: Gary Ombler / Getty (phone)

Of all the liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the most underrated by far is the one that gives us the right to complain to our elected officials. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly: all of these are far more widely known, legislated, and litigated than the right to—as the founders rather tactfully put it—“petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

There are a great many ways to petition the government, including with actual petitions, but, short of showing up in person, the one reputed to be the most effective is picking up the phone and calling your congressional representatives. In the weeks following the Inauguration of Donald J. Trump, so many people started doing so that, in short order, voice mail filled up and landlines began blurting out busy signals. Pretty soon, even e-mails were bouncing back, with the information that the target in-box was full and the suggestion that senders “contact the recipient directly.” That being impractical, motivated constituents turned to other means. The thwarted and outraged took to Facebook or Twitter or the streets. The thwarted and determined dug up direct contact information for specific congressional staffers. The thwarted and clever remembered that it was still possible, several technological generations later, to send faxes; one Republican senator received, from a single Web-based faxing service, seven thousand two hundred and seventy-six of them in twenty-four hours. The thwarted and creative phoned up a local pizza joint, ordered a pie, and had it delivered, with a side of political opinion, to the Senate.

Americans vote, if we vote at all, roughly once every two years. But even in a slow season, when no one is resorting to faxes or protests or pizza-grams, we participate in the political life of our nation vastly more often by reaching out to our members of Congress. When we do so, however, we almost never get to speak to them directly. Instead, we wind up dealing with one of the thousands of people, many of them too young to rent a car, who collectively constitute the customer-service workforce of democracy.

For them, as for so many of us, life in the past several weeks has taken a turn for the strange and exhausting. Politically minded citizens who went to work for Congress now find themselves in the situation of airline agents during a Category 4 hurricane: a relatively small cohort with limited resources encounters a huge number of people up in arms. If you tried to call a federal legislator anytime in the past several weeks (and, full disclosure, I did: for almost my entire adult life, I have been the kind of person who likes to talk to her elected officials, from school-board members on up to senators), you were as likely as not to reach an automated recording informing you that your call could not be answered, “due to an unusually high call volume.”

Bureaucratically speaking, those are some of the most irritating words on the planet. But, politically speaking, they are the start of a tantalizing sentence: Due to an unusually high call volume, what? At present, an enormous number of people are calling their political representatives, not always to obvious effect. So what difference does it really make in the minds of lawmakers—and, more to the point, on the floors of the House and the Senate—when large numbers of everyday people start contacting Congress?

In 1876, the centenary of American independence, Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent for the telephone, and that device has been mixed up with our national politics ever since. The following year, Rutherford B. Hayes had one installed in the White House. (Its phone number was “1.”) Three years later, the technology came to Capitol Hill, in the form of a single phone placed in the lobby of the House of Representatives, where it was answered, increasingly often and increasingly to his inconvenience, by the House doorkeeper. More phones appeared soon afterward, but demand kept outstripping supply, until, eventually, Congress purchased a hundred-line switchboard, placed it in the Capitol Building, and, in 1898, hired a young woman named Harriott Daley to operate it.

“A brisk, pleasant little woman with probably the most important unofficial position in the United States Congress”: that is how a newspaper correspondent once described Daley, who was twenty-five, widowed, and raising a young daughter when she took the job. In the beginning, she worked alone, from eight in the morning until as late as midnight, answering some two hundred calls a day across all of Congress. By the middle of the twentieth century, that number had increased to sixty thousand, or almost twenty-two million calls a year, and the telephone staff had grown in tandem. By the time Daley retired, in 1945, she oversaw fifty other operators, colloquially known as Hello Girls. Also by then, she could reputedly recognize some ninety-six senators, three hundred and ninety-four representatives, and three hundred journalists by the sound of their voices.

Almost as soon as Daley began answering the phones, everyday citizens began using them to give legislators a piece of their mind. In 1928, an oil and gas company urged citizens to call their senators to oppose a gas tax; sometime later, a Utah gentleman published a poem urging people to call their senators to request better wintertime road-clearing. Other early telephone activists called Congress about other concerns: the Selective Service, school funding, Social Security legislation, power-company regulation, the agricultural potential of sugar beets. By mid-century, a Marjorie Lansing, of Massachusetts, was travelling around the country encouraging constituents to adopt “the pester technique”: “Call your senator in his office, call him at home late at night, call him in the morning before he’s had his breakfast eggs.” Even members of Congress sometimes urged people to call members of Congress: in 1941, Representative Jeannette Rankin, of Montana, told those opposed to American involvement in the Second World War to “call your congressman by telephone every day and tell him how you feel.”

Today, thanks to the Internet-as-all-purpose-phone-book, it is easier than ever to call your Congress members, by bypassing the switchboard and phoning their offices directly. If you do so, your call will be answered not by a Capitol operator (today, they number only in the couple of dozen) but, most likely, by a staff assistant or an intern. Staff assistants are typically recent college graduates, twenty-three or twenty-four years old, learning the ropes of American politics before they go off to get a business degree or a master’s in political science. Interns tend to be even younger—nineteen- and twenty-year-olds taking a summer job or some time off from school—although they do basically the same work, usually minus the salary. Together, these staffers can be found working for the five hundred and thirty-five voting members of Congress, the forty-nine congressional committees, commissions, and caucuses, and the district office of every lawmaker in every state. An exact head count is hard to come by, but the congressional employees whose time is mostly spent fielding constituent messages number in the thousands.

How seriously those messages are taken by Congress varies widely, chiefly because, when it comes to interacting with the public, there’s really no such thing as Congress per se. There are five hundred and thirty-five small businesses that together form the legislative arm of government, and their way of dealing with constituents can differ as much as their politics. As a logistical matter, however, most congressional offices function in roughly the same way. No matter how a message comes in—by phone, e-mail, post, fax, carrier pigeon—it is entered into a software program known as a constituent-management system. Owing to stringent security requirements, only a few of these systems are authorized by Congress, and many members use one called Intranet Quorum, made by Leidos, a Virginia-based defense contractor and technology company. Like many things the federal government purchases from such companies, it is expensive, as are the other human and technological resources that go into fielding the concerns of average Americans. According to Bradford Fitch, the President of the Congressional Management Foundation (C.M.F.), a nonpartisan nonprofit group that works to improve the efficacy of interactions between citizens and lawmakers, constituent communications account for twenty to thirty per cent of the budget for every congressional office on Capitol Hill.