Step-by-Step Organizer Toolkit for the People's Campaign for the Constitution
FAQ on the Strategy of the PCC
If your group is considering getting involved with the People’s Campaign for the Constitution (PCC), members may have some important questions to ask before they decide to get involved. The following are concerns that friends and potential allies may raise about the specific strategy of the PCC along with responses that speak to each concern.
Concerns/Questions people may ask about the PCC |
The PCC’s Responses to those doubts |
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| 1. Our group wants to maintain our issue focus. We want to stay focused on our issue (e.g. the war, impeachment, torture, or privacy), because we can't be effective when we spread too thin. | A broader coalition with a common strategic focus is stronger. This campaign is about building political power by helping to unite people who see that the common challenges we face share a common root: the erosion of constitutional limits on government power. We have an opportunity to create a coalition with a common strategic focus for advancing our common demands, and we can do this without losing sight of the issue focus that each group maintains. In fact, uniting across issues can help build our base. Each group can continue educating and involving others in its issues, but we’ll all be stronger by supporting each other. | |
| 2. Our group has found our representative to be unresponsive and recalcitrant. We have already tried to get our representative to talk with us, but he/she simply refuses. | Let’s focus on strengthening our coalition as a way to compel our representative to act. Perhaps our representative ignores our group because s/he perceives us as weak. This campaign's success is not measured simply by whether our representative shows up or not, but by how well we can publicly position ourselves through our local coalition as having moral authority derived from the Constitution. Once we’ve accomplish that, we will be in a strengthened position to compel our representative to respond to our demands. | |
| 3. Our group is already doing everything possible. We are already trying to demand accountability of our Congressperson by getting our people to put pressure on him through phone calls and letters. | Broadening our coalitions can help us be more effective. We need to continue those ways of pressuring Congress, but we can be more effective by articulating a unified public voice that represents a broad cross-section of our community. | |
| 4. We need to reach out to non-allies. Forming a new group sounds like it could just be more preaching to the choir. People in activist groups already know that these issues are closely connected. We need to reach out to people who believe Bush is protecting us from terrorism--not more endless meetings with the same crowd. | Organizing the choir is just the first step. We do need a core group to start reaching out, but the whole point of this campaign is to reach “beyond the choir.” Many people in our community are upset and frustrated, because in many cases it is unclear how public pressure can be made effective. To address this, we can establish common ground among community-based groups and individuals working to reverse the harms of the so-called “Global war on Terror” based on our commitment to defend the Constitution. This can help us gain greater legitimacy and numbers. We’ll need this to command the attention of our legislators and candidates for public office, to be able to make common core demands together, and to hold our legislators accountable for carrying them out. With this campaign, we can provide a framework of action that the general public will be able to join—regardless of their political affiliations. | |
| 5. Accountability is difficult to achieve. How can we really hold our representative accountable? The only way to do that is to vote him/her out, or to run a candidate against him/her. | Accountability is necessary and grounded in the Constitution. This campaign is about changing the relationship between the people and the Congress, so that Congress works for the people. That won't be easy, but it is necessary, and we have the Constitution on our side. The underlying reason for holding politicians accountable is that government must adhere to the Constitution in all its functions. This is true no matter who is elected. | |
| 6. But the electoral system doesn’t work for us, so our efforts to press Congress are undermined. Certain parts of our congressional district reliably vote for the incumbent no matter what because our representative gets earmarks for them. The district’s borders are drawn (gerrymandered) so that our representative doesn’t need to rely on our part of it for support. Since the politicians are choosing the electorate rather than the other way around, electing a different representative seems politically impossible. | We still have many organizing opportunities despite these real challenges. Voting a representative out of office is the main way the Constitution promises that citizens can hold lawmakers accountable, but gerrymandering and many other aspects of the electoral system stand in the way of that working. We still need to change Congress’s attitude about the Constitution, because its role in checking executive power is so important. |
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7. We don’t want to duplicate efforts. The issues that the PCC is trying to address seem to be also on the agenda of other national groups. I don’t want to just duplicate efforts. How is the PCC coordinating with other national groups? |
Through this campaign, we're promoting cooperation among national groups to avoid duplication of efforts. The PCC can provide groups with a new and promising way for pursuing the common goal of defending the Constitution, which many national and local groups share. A unique contribution of the PCC is to create a more effective model of grassroots groups gaining power. That's what we need to deal with the constitutional crisis that we're all facing. |