Roll Call reports that the congressional switchboard has been overwhelmed with telephone calls for four consecutive days, since conservative Talk Radio host Rush Limbaugh encouraged to call their congressmen and protest Obamacare.
“Calls to the House numbered close to 100,000 an hour, creating a bottleneck in a phone system only meant to handle 50,000 calls an hour. The chamber has been similarly overloaded for four consecutive days, beginning on Tuesday when radio host Rush Limbaugh told viewers to call the Capitol switchboard phone number,” Roll Call said.
Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for Dan Beard, the House Chief Administrative Officer – who works for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – seems to be seeking to minimize the significance of this deluge of public opinion focused on Congress.
“It’s not like Congress has come to a communication standstill,” Ventura told Roll Call.
Roll Call notes that “this isn’t the first time Congress has been overcome with phone calls and e-mails in the runup to an important vote. Interest in the 2008 stimulus bill crashed House.gov and some Member Web sites, and in November, the Senate’s voice mail system was overloaded before the chamber’s cloture vote on health care reform legislation.”
But four consecutive days?
I don’t recall Congress being thus beseiged since President Ronald Reagan encouraged the public to contact Congress and urge passage of his tax cut bill. As I recall, the capitol switchboard was overwhelmed for a day or two and Western Union was similarly flooded with an unprecedented flood of telegrams.
