During the February recess, left-wing activists stormed a number of congressional town hall meetings. Some Republicans reacted by calling them “paid protestors,” but that’s almost certainly untrue. You don’t need to pay people who are as evidently motivated as the fanatics showing up at these town halls to shout disrupt.
And especially in the cases of senators, it’s highly unlikely that many of the protestors are non-constituents being bused in, although evidently there have been cases of this.
But what you can definitely say is that the disruptors have not been terribly representative of the local populations. The very recent election results show as much, especially in some the jurisdictions where they’ve been showing up in places like Utah, Arkansas and Louisiana.
This may have also been true of the Tea Partiers who began storming town halls in late 2009. But of course, in their case, they weren’t coming out just on the heels of an election whose outcome they didn’t like. A plausible period of time had passed by then — the Congress was well in the process of no good (the House had passed the stimulus and cap-and-trade, and drafts of Obamacare were already public under construction in committee).
If there’s anything pernicious about the current protests, it’s that the new town hall pirates appear to be working from a national playbook that advises them to resist any effort at constructive engagement and suppress participation from other constituents outside their group. The Daily Caller’s Peter Hasson has a write-up of leaked audio from organizers of one of these townhall “protest rallies” in Breaux Bridge, La., that was obtained by a local radio station.
“Game plan number one is to fill as many seats as we can, right? If it’s all of us in there and the poor people of Breaux Bridge are sitting behind us, well then tough luck for them,” said one organizer, identified by KPEL as James Proctor. His “poor people” comment drew laughs from the other activists.
“If we can arrange it so he doesn’t hear one sympathetic question — great. That only magnifies our impact,” Proctor said.
This is constitutionally protected behavior, of course, but it doesn’t exactly sound like “civic engagement” in its true spirit. And people should keep that in mind when they see the scenes coming out of these town halls. Town halls are one method by which members of Congress keep in touch with their constituents. This appears to be not just an effort to show organized opposition — perfectly appropriate — but a conspiracy to prevent other constituents from participating to the extent possible in order to dominate the media coverage.
“The Indivisible Guide does say that when you start to lose the meeting, that’s when you boo and hiss,” one unidentified activist can be heard saying. “Right, I was going to say that,” another activist replied. Local news outlet The Advertiser reported that members of the crowd “frequently interrupted, expressing disagreement with some of Cassidy’s positions and shouting out their own questions.”
This is a lot like the effect they had at Rep. Jason Chaffetz’s earlier town hall (one protestor was arrested for shoving a police officer), booing and hissing incessantly, to the point that he couldn’t answer most of the questions. They never lost control of that one.
But as with the Tea Parties, it’s one thing to make noise and quite another to demonstrate your relevance. The new disruptors are going to have to prove themselves at the ballot box, just as the Tea Partiers had to. They did it first in Virginia’s and New Jersey’s general elections in 2009, and then followed up with the upset victory in the Massachusetts Senate special election in January 2010.
Unless they can score a nearly unthinkable upset in the upcoming special elections Kansas or South Carolina (replacing congressmen Mike Pompeo and Mick Mulvaney), the un-Tea Party’s first big test on Republican ground will probably be April 18, in the special election for suburban Atlanta House seat vacated by HHS Secretary Tom Price.
