At the Daily Kos activism team, we ask you to sign petitions and e-mail your members of Congress every day.
But when some Democrats keep voting the wrong way, we must amp up the pressure—and have constituents call their office.
Last week, the Republican House voted on a bill to weaken the most crucial protections of Dodd-Frank. To add insult to injury, 35 House Democrats voted “yes.”
When you look at who were the 35 Democrats, some of the names may surprise you: they are not all conservative Blue Dogs. It’s proof that Wall Street pays close attention to these votes—and rewards those who do their bidding.
So we set up a Daily Kos petition denouncing the 35 House Democrats, which over 118,000 people have signed. We also generated thousands of emails from their constituents.
This week, the House voted again to gut Wall Street reform with HR 37—but this time only 29 Democrats supported the same legislation.
Four Democrats switched their votes from yes to no (Bobby Rush of Chicago, Hank Johnson from the Atlanta suburbs, Elizabeth Etsy of Connecticut and Suzan DelBene of Washington), three more did not vote, and one Democrat—Brian Higgins of New York—flipped the other way.
So our work clearly had an impact, but not enough. Every time a Democrat abandons the Party to shill for corporations at the expense of their constituents, we must let them know we are watching and won’t forget when it comes time for re-election.
And that means ratcheting up the pressure. Sure, it’s a lot easier to press “click” with an email—but clogging the Congressmember’s telephone line is harder for them to ignore.
If your Congressmember voted to gut Wall Street Reform a second time, we need you to call them and express your disapproval. We have made it really easy for you by writing a script, and listing the phone numbers of the 29 House Democrats.
After you make the call (which only takes five minutes), we ask you to fill out the form at the bottom of our landing page to give us feedback on how it went. A few of our folks have been making these calls already, and we’ll have a follow-up blog post on what they’re hearing.
UPDATE (7:45 PM P.S.T.): John Garamendi, one of the 3 House Democrats to vote "yes" last week and then switch to "not voting" issued a statement tonight saying that he was out of town on a family emergency—but would have voted "no" if present. He also credits the response from his constituents as to why he would have switched.
Click below the fold for a complete list of the 29 House Democrats.
Brad Ashford (NE-02)
Ami Bera (CA-07)
Don Beyer (VA-08)
Sanford Bishop (GA-02)
Julia Brownley (CA-26)
Cheri Bustos (IL-17)
John Carney (DE-AL)
Gerry Connolly (VA-11)
Henry Cuellar (TX-28)
John Delaney (MD-06)
Bill Foster (IL-11)
Gwen Graham (FL-02)
Brian Higgins (NY-26)
Jim Himes (CT-04)
Derek Kilmer (WA-06)
Ron Kind (WI-03)
Rick Larsen (WA-02)
Dan Lipinski (IL-03)
Sean Maloney (NY-18)
Patrick Murphy (FL-18)
Scott Peters (CA-52)
Jared Polis (CO-02)
Mike Quigley (IL-05)
Raul Ruiz (CA-36)
Kurt Schrader (OR-05)
David Scott (GA-13)
Terri Sewell (AL-07)
Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-09)
Albio Sires (NJ-08)
