Buy Me A Coffee

Buy me a coffeeBuy me a coffee

Saturday, January 26, 2019

The number you have McCauled is not in service

Just how "out of touch" is Congressional District 10 Rep. Michael McCaul (R) of Austin? Try calling his Washington, DC, office phone number, the one listed on his official government web page - 202-225-2401. You get this message: "The number you have dialed is incorrect. Please check the number and try again."
This is no momentary glitch. It has been this way for months and has been brought to staffers' attention. It is also deeply symbolic of McCaul's utter disdain for his constituents and the democratic process. A call to the congressman's Austin office often leads to a "leave a message" invitation rather than a live staffer. Sometimes even that option is unavailable as the message box is full.
At midmorning.
On a Wednesday.
Note: Texans trying to reach the correctly listed and technically working DC offices for our state's two Republican senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, often get answering machines full from previously answered calls. I know. I call. A lot. I have even resorted to requesting when one office finally answers that they run down the hall and make sure their non-responsive colleagues are OK. Or I tell the Austin office of the MoC I am trying to reach that their DC counterparts are not picking up and that is unacceptable, or vice versa, because that happens, too.
McCaul's in-person record for "presence" is no better. He has not held an open town hall meeting since he took office - in a then-newly gerrymandered GOP district - in a decade. That is 10 years. Instead, he has gotten chambers of commerce to sponsor him for "legislative updates" during election seasons. These events are highly controlled and McCaul gets quite uncomfortable should anyone ask a non-scripted question.
Members of the Indivisible movement have trekked to McCaul's Austin congressional office to personally hand letters to staffers and ask questions. The response is polite yet the congressman never seems to answer the questions posed, week after week after week. He needs to.
This week McCaul announced he is running for re-election in 2020, after just barely getting re-elected in 2018. His Democratic challenger from last year, Mike Siegel, announced Jan. 19 his intention to run against McCaul again in 2020.
Is McCaul going to become any more (read: at all) responsive to constituents' concerns or will he remain intentionally disconnected? We shall see. A working and published DC office phone number might be a good start. Maybe even with a live human at the other end and whose written comments and questions from constituents McCaul actually takes notice of? Nah.... That is just too much to ask. But it should not be.

3 comments:

  1. Update: McCaul's DC phone number listed in article is now working! Got through to an actual live human being yesterday.

    ReplyDelete