A reminder to contact your representatives

I would like to remind everyone on Reddit to regularly contact your representatives in all means available. Senate, congressional, and local government issues are very important to the progress of the nation and local areas. There are many online services to make contacting your representative offices through e-mail, postal mail, and phone, very easy to do.

One such service is called http://www.opencongress.org , which allows you to register on the website and receive updates from senate bills and your congressional district. Another useful option is googling for your representatives name, which often turns up their personal website. This allows you to get an active line of communication on how your representative is behaving throughout his or her career, as well as subscription to a newsletter of relevant issues from that representative.

There are also government provided methods for contacting your representative, such as https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml . You can also use another resource, http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml , to contact representatives outside of your district. Always convey your concerns to your district representative, senators, and then branch outward if necessary.

Keep the responses to your concerns on file, and if necessary share them with local media sources or the internet. A courteous and short e-mail, or letter, with a written response to a previously unknown political stance can be very informative. Giving these to a local paper also has the effect of damaging, or aiding, his or her standing in the district that voted the person in office. This is one manner in which writing or e-mailing is more useful than phoning in for responses or feedback. Tutorials and guidelines exist for the letter format, such as available here: http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/uscongress/a/letterscongress.htm

ALSO, please DO vote in candidate primaries for your respective party. If you are like me, you can do some "underhanded" thinking and register for the party you don't actually like. I registered republican so that I could vote in the private republican primary, for example, to give Ron Paul better odds. Registering unaffiliated, or independent, can actually harm your ability to directly influence a given party.

TL;DR: Please contact your representative through all the means available, and let them know how to represent you in recent and upcoming congressional and senate bills. At the very least, you can create a paper file of "official" responses, allowing you to speak out against them directly.