Missing in Action
Georgia Representatives Refuse to Hold Town Halls
By Ross Williams [email protected]
Congressman Barry Loudermilk recently walked into an International House of Pancakes in Woodstock for a meeting with constituents. He was the featured speaker for a weekly breakfast meeting series for local conservatives. But Loudermilk said he has no plans to take part in a traditional town hall meeting with constituents.
“We don’t right now,” he said in the IHOP parking lot. “I’m out in the community continuously doing things like this meeting. The town halls we’re doing have been pretty open. So we just haven’t had any of those old traditional town halls because they have not been productive. It’s usually just a chance for people to come in and take over and scream and holler, and so we found it more productive to do more smaller venues such as what I’m doing here.”
Some of Loudermilk’s colleagues have first-hand experience with disruptive town hall participants. A tense Roswell town hall for Republican congressman Rich McCormick of Suwanee helped spur GOP leadership to call on members to tamp down in-person town halls.
Last month, Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Rome went ahead with plans for an Acworth town hall, which turned Jerry Springer-esque when multiple protesters were dragged out, shocked with a Taser and arrested.
Georgia’s Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock faced hecklers at a recent Atlanta town hall, who shouted over him for several minutes in opposition of the senator’s vote to sell weapons for Israel to use in Gaza, and fellow Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff faced civil but tense questioning from fired federal workers who questioned his commitment to fighting for them. Similar scenes have played out across the country.
Still, it would be hard to characterize the IHOP get-together as “pretty open.” It was not advertised, and an organizer refused to open the meeting to a reporter.
Earlier this month, Cherokee County Democrats held a mock town hall featuring a cardboard cutout of Waldo, the hard-to-find world traveler from the Where’s Waldo books, with Loudermilk’s face. Waleska resident Genevieve Hutchings said she’s been trying to get in touch with Loudermilk for months and wants him to host a public town hall. Hutchings was one of a few dozen protesters in downtown Woodstock on a rainy weekend as part of the progressive Indivisible movement, which has hosted larger protests outside Loudermilk’s office.
“That’s divisive for our county and for our country, if that’s his stance, that he’s only going to meet the people that agree with him,” she said. “And how could he possibly govern in a way that’s going to be helpful to all of those constituents if he doesn’t hear from all of them?”
Further down the road, Woodstock resident John Thomas held a one-man counterprotest, holding up a sign with the Trump-Vance logo atop a pair of garden gnomes. Thomas said he expects to see members of Congress host town halls as well. “America was founded on, you know, stump speeches and people standing out there and taking questions and answering questions from all sides.”
With most of Georgia’s congressional districts safe for either party, politicians are unlikely to face a real threat from the other side, said University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock. That means there’s no real incentive for most politicians to face the heat from constituents on the opposite political wavelength.
“This has been kind of going on for a few years now, and Democrats saw this with Obamacare back in 2010 with Democrat members of Congress being shouted down,” said Kennesaw State University political science professor and former Cobb County GOP Chair Jason Shepherd. “Now we see it with Republicans, and it makes it impossible for actual constituents, because let’s face it, a lot of times the people who show up to town halls and disrupt things don’t even live in the district, can’t even vote for the member of Congress.”
Shepherd said it makes sense for politicians to try to avoid shouty town halls or to replace them with streamed events with pre-screened questions, but doing so is anti-democratic. “This is part of our democracy,” he said. “You’re not only going up in front of voters every two or six years, but these are your bosses. These are the people whose taxes pay your paycheck.”
A longer version of this article originally appeared at georgiarecorder.com.
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