Writing your Representatives

July 22, 2001

For many of us, writing our representatives is too energy consuming.

Anyone who has tried to write to multiple congressmen as I have been

doing this weekend via email, the most energy conserving form of

communication, can become very frustrating. Many, if not most,

congressmen no longer have regular email addresses on their websites

and only take email from constituents of their own districts.

This cuts down on volume.

I found a way around that.

I have spent the weekend writing to each member of the House

Agricultural Committee as that body has vowed to stop the School

Pesticide Notification Bill given the objections of the Agricultural

industries (evidently they have mistaken schools for fields and people

for crops).

I used the THOMAS site to get listings of pertinent committee members,

at this URL:

I then went to each of their linked websites. For those who publish a

regular email address, I pasted a copy of my letter to the committee and

put the individual's name on the salutation.

Frequently, representatives did NOT do so, but directed their

constituents to use the congressional " Write Your Representative Page "

linked to their site. You need an address within their district to then

write to them using email as this modality requires use of the

district's zip code. In that event, I copied down one of the addresses

given on the reps website for their own local offices. Using their own

address and zip code, I would then send them an email. I always put my

own address into the spaces left for such information and apologised for

the " trick " with a brief sentence early in my letter:

" Please excuse me for using your office address to enable the use of

email to deliver this letter. I am disabled and drafting printed letters

in addition to the expenses of mailing them to multiple recipients is

not practical for me. However, committee members must expect

correspondence from diverse locations. "

If you just want to know the names of a particular state's

representatives, you can get a full listing of linked reps at:

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