Report: Pat Toomey Gets More Faxes Than Any Other U.S. Lawmaker

Maybe that's why he doesn't pick up his phone — too busy refilling the machine.

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Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey receives more faxes than any other U.S. lawmaker, according to Fax Zero, a website that lets people send faxes for free and keeps tabs on who’s raking up the most.

According to the website, Toomey has received more than 1,000 faxes within the last 24 hours. That’s almost double the amount that runner-up California Sen. Dianne Feinstein has received in that same time span – more than 600 faxes. (By the way, Pennsylvania Rep. Bob Casey, who reportedly received close to 200 faxes within the last 24 hours, ranks sixth on the website’s list.)

Apparently, Sen. Toomey is notoriously hard to reach. And that doesn’t just include this past weekend, when he reportedly traveled to a luxury resort in Palm Springs, California for an event with billionaire donors as thousands of demonstrators (and some politicians) flooded the Philadelphia International Airport to protest President Donald Trump‘s executive order on immigration.

Toomey has received a flood of complaints from a group that calls itself “Tuesdays with Toomey,” aptly-named because its members crowd the politician’s Center City office every Tuesday afternoon to protest a range of issues, including Toomey’s push to punish so-called sanctuary cities like Philadelphia and his support for Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney general.

The group has complained numerous times that Toomey’s office has ignored their calls and locked them out of the building – as staffers claimed they were “committed elsewhere.” The flood of calls that Toomey’s office has received likely grew this weekend – in fact, staffers from Toomey’s Johnstown office told reporters that they’ve received “thousands” of messages since Trump signed his executive order on immigration last Friday.

At least a Toomey staffer met with Bob Finkelstein, a Philly-based freelance writer and Multiple Sclerosis patient whose open letter to Toomey regarding the Affordable Care Act spread rapidly after the Multiple Sclerosis Society shared it. In the letter, Finkelstein wrote that if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, the cost of the medication that helps keep him alive would jump to $32,000 a year. Toomey has pushed to repeal the Affordable Care Act within Trump’s first year of presidency.

“I still don’t know what the senator’s stance is,” Finkelstein told PhillyVoice after the meeting. “I had very specific questions about policy, and I told them that this isn’t just about me, but it’s about a lot of the senator’s constituents, and it could have a life-or-death impact.”

Follow @ClaireSasko on Twitter.