Step-by-Step Organizer Toolkit for the People's Campaign for the Constitution
Tactics for the Public Campaign
Congressional representatives are accustomed to setting the terms of the political discussions in which they engage, but your demands are premised on the idea that those terms should be set quite differently. Our purpose is to change the question so we stop asking, “How much freedom must we sacrifice to ensure security?” because there is no good answer to that question. Instead, we want to get people asking, "How can we restore Constitutional protections of our rights and enforce constitutional limitations on government power?"
Representatives are unlikely to respond publicly to your demands or agree to a public forum in which they are held to account for their actions unless they think that doing so will serve their political interests more than ignoring the demand. To shift the debate, you need to convey the perception that the coalition you’ve worked so hard to build speaks with a compelling message and that it has enough community support to mobilize people.
There are many different ways for your coalition to communicate its message to the public and its demands to candidates for public office. Through each method, you want to be able to present a consistent message summing up your demands. You're asking that candidates adopt the resolution as a promise or compact with the community.
Tactics are a means of reaching your goal, and which ones you choose depend on your specific situation. Knowing what demands your coalition agreed to and how strong the power base of candidates in your district is as compared to your own coalition will help your group decide upon tactics.
Public Accountability Forums
Accountability forums can be moderated by local community leaders and/or an expert on the Constitution, such as a constitutional law professor. Representatives of the local coalition would present the congressional representative with the demands for restoring constitutional protections. Following this presentation, the public can ask questions about an official's adherence to the Constitution.
Setting up this kind of public forum involves negotiating a schedule with the representative. A good way to start is to send a letter signed by the member groups of your coalition to the representative requesting a meeting. You can ask the representative to name a date that would work for them within a certain period of time, such as the district work period. See dates of these periods here.
"Empty Chair" Forums
Public meetings can also be held without the representative attending. In situations where a public official is unwilling to attend the public accountability forum, the event could become an organizing meeting that involves:
- Educating on that official's role in unconstitutional policies. Speakers can respond to public statements made by the representative pertaining to the issues your coalition is focusing on.
- Publicizing the local effort to gain broader and deeper public support for the coalition's common demands.
- Strategizing on other creative ways to present the demands to the representative.
Candidate Questionnaires
Questionnaires are a way to help put candidates on the record with the public. To make your own candidate questionnaire, you can use the resources in BORDC’s 2006 Voter Information Guide <COMING SOON: the 2008 Voter Information Guide>
See how your representative voted on key pieces of recent legislation, and fill out this voting record form as a informational piece on the voting records of incumbent candidates.
Town Hall Meetings
Town Hall Meetings are typically called by the representative during periods when they’re back in their own district. Not all representatives do this, and finding the schedules of these meetings is not always easy.
The Rural Organizing Project organizes people to turn out for Town Hall Meetings and take over the agenda of the meeting. The purpose of this tactic is 1) to put legislators on record about their positions and 2) to demonstrate public support for the coalition’s demands. You can use this tactic even without going through all the effort of independently organizing a forum, but as a result, your coalition's leadership will have far less say over the agenda.
The key is to organize people ahead of time so that group members are prepared with pointed questions to get their message across. You can take the opportunity to present a resolution to your representatives stating the coalition’s demands.
Candidate Debates
When candidate debates are happening in your district, you can organize your members in a similar fashion to get your questions raised. Or you can run your public accountability forum as a debate among candidates, although this works best in situations where the incumbent is not running.
Local Resolutions
Municipal resolutions have already been used throughout the country to put pressure indirectly on Congress to defend the Bill of Rights. These resolutions are statements of principle that 414 local governments from coast to coast have used to put themselves on record as refusing to carry out laws and policies that violated their residents’ constitutional rights (See a map or alphabetical list). Virtually all of these resolutions called on members of Congress to restore the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. If your local government has not already passed a resolution and you think working at the local level is more promising than at the congressional level, this strategy might be most useful. If your local government has already passed such a resolution, you can use it as backup to your argument for your demands on Congress. In some cases, you may be able to get your local government to express its support for your demands based on the argument that they represent the community's interest in preserving our country's Constitution -- specifically the rule of law, balance of powers, and Bill of Rights.
Community groups also can ask their local government to take action to protect civil liberties locally by enacting ordinances instructing local police to not cooperate with federal spying and immigration enforcement, instructing local officials to challenge illegal national security letters, or protecting the right of public assembly in the locality. If and when local governments feel they have done all they can to protect rights, local government advocacy to reverse the constitutional decay at the federal level becomes an important next step.
Escalating Tactics
All the above approaches are different ways to engage our representatives in serious dialog about our issues, but there will still be situations where even if we perform all these tactics with great skill and on a large scale, it may not be enough to substantially move our representatives.
That leaves groups with the option of escalating tactics. If representatives are unwilling to come before public accountability forums, and are unwilling to change their votes so as to fulfill their constitutional obligations, groups can visit the offices and homes and stay there until their demands are met. Taking such action normally carries with it higher risks. Few people will think the risk is worthwhile unless there is a movement around them willing to take greater risks too.
Escalating tactics in this way is more effective when it follows up on the previous steps – rather than just standing by itself – because those steps help build a strong public base of support and demonstrate the coalition's willingness to speak with civility and integrity.
