CONGRESS SAYS: “THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING”

DAVID SEGAL

After the markup, but well before the blackout, we’d already heard from several offices that the volume of constituent contacts that they were receiving had been surpassed only by the immigration reform debate, Obama’s health care reform push, or for many offices, never at all. Even more spectacularly: in the case of the prior debates, America’s sentiments were substantially divided. But when it came to SOPA, something like 99% of us—regardless of party, geography, or ideological self-identity—were on the same side.

Some of these offices—like Ron Paul’s—were congratulatory. Others, particularly those that were complicit in attempting to foist SOPA on the American public, were a bit less gracious.

During the markup, Illinois Democrat and Judiciary Committee member Mike Quigley berated his own constituents as he argued that many SOPA opponents who’d contacted him had “a vision of the Internet that [was] unacceptable.” His office also seemed to think it unacceptable, or unfathomable, that they’d have been inundated with so much concern from their residents of Illinois’s 5th—or that some constituents might even have emailed them twice. We’d run several anti-SOPA and PIPA actions, first urging lawmakers to decline to cosponsor the bill, then urging them to take action to oppose it, and so on. Thousands of new people participated in each successive action, and many of the bills’ most adamant opponents became repeat offenders.

Each contact we generated included a name, email address, and street address—not terribly difficult for a Congressional office to corroborate. Even so, here’s the email we received from Quigley’s office after we forwarded along the notes our members had generated:

Thank you for this information; it is useful. However, because many of the names are repeated, but with slightly different messages, it appears as though these addresses and messages were fabricated. Perhaps you could explain how these messages were created. Providing more legitimate constitute letters would make taking this information into account more acceptable to our office.

Consider that for a moment: a Congress so insulated from its constituencies, a so-called Republic in which public participation is so depressed, that a substantial number of its lawmakers—including a robust bipartisan cadre in the Senate—even pursue as a priority fiercely unpopular Internet censorship legislation to begin with. And then its members’ first impulse upon receiving emails from five thousand or so constituents (representing less than 1% of the population of even the smallest Congressional district) to express their discontent with such is to believe that those constituents couldn’t possibly be real. Simply cross-referencing the ample identifying information with the districts’ voter file and—if overkill is your style—sending inquiries to a handful of email-senders would’ve done the trick. The people who emailed the congressman most frequently are precisely those whose concerns he should have taken most seriously, for being the most engaged in the political process.

Though he’d been among Congress’s most intransigent, even Quigley eventually came around, releasing a statement after the blackout that read “I have decided to oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act and will continue to oppose anti-piracy legislation until a compromise can be struck that protects the free and open nature of the Internet.” What a glorious testament to the new found power of the Internet public—and to the foolishness of Quigley’s brand of pomposity.