Not too long ago, I wrote about a writing campaign I'm starting, as part of a larger plan to develop a more direct flow of information from voters to Congressmen:
Step one: directly inform the legislators that we are paying attention to their votes.
Step two: develop a concise, progressive platform.
Step three: lobby Congress and push them towards our agenda.
This writing campaign is part of the first step. Like many of you, I am angry with Congress for a variety of reasons, including the Patriot Act, the MCA, and the FISA "fix." I am angry with the Democratic leadership for capitulating to Bush on that last one, and allowing an unconstitutional bill to be brought to the floor for a vote. But most of my disgust is reserved for the legislators that voted for the bill, which includes all (but 6) Republicans, Lieberman, and 16 Democrats. Their votes demonstrate to me that they do not care about the Constitution.
The campaign is simple: I mailed in postcards to everyone who voted for the FISA bill. Postcards are short, cheap, and using simple technology can easily be designed online.
Campaign tools:
Usng MS Excel have compiled a spreadsheet of every US Senator's DC office address and telephone number. With that spreadsheet I have created a mailing list of every Senator that voted against the Fourth Amendment. I also designed a simple, text-only postcard in MS Word, and used a USPS affiliate direct-mailing website that prints and ships them to the mailing list I created.
Here's some sample text (postcard front):
When you abdicate the Constitution, the terrorists win.
(and postcard back):
As an elected official, you have a Constitutional Duty to protect democracy here in America. Attempting to gain security by sacrificing liberty is also a foolish action because it increases the potential for harm.
I was very sorry to see that you supported the recent FISA bill. Your shameful vote to allow the government to spy on American citizens, on voters, makes no sense.
So, today I mailed 60 postcards to the 60 Senators that voted for FISA (total cost: around $21), and I did it all from my computer in about 10 minutes (after I put together the spreadsheet). My next step is to finish the spreadsheets of local office addresses, and send postcards to local offices as well. The spreadsheet will take longer to make, since most politicians have more than one local office. After that, it's time for the House. I will be posting periodically when I have completed spreadsheets.
In the meantime, Kossacks, my one-woman postcard campaign could sure use your help. I've made those nice spreadsheets and provided some (hopefully) useful links. The spreadsheets are in MS Excel format, published as webpages. All you have to do to is follow the links, copy and paste the spreadsheets into MS Excel on your own computer, and then make a simple text postcard. The direct mailing website uses the excel file you specify to make a mailing list, so it's super easy. If 99 other people send 60 cards, that's 100 postcards to every Senator who voted against the Constitution.
This could be a great tool to let our legislators know that we're paying attention. The beauty of it is, once you have the Senator address list, you can send postcards to any of them, for any other reason that you might be feeling upset.