What happens when members of Congress do their jobs?
Now that's what I call Constituency Service, Vol. 1
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When you’re facing an authoritarian threat as serious as the one posed by Trump 2.0, you need opposition leaders in Congress who:
Publicly recognize the gravity of the situation
Understand that the politics of 20, 30, or 40 years ago isn’t strong enough to break past that gravity
Possess the creativity (or a staff with creativity) to come up with new forms of action that meet the moment
Actually take these actions at opportune moments
Unfortunately for America, we live in a highly polarized two-party system, which means that these tasks fall mainly to the Democrats. I say “unfortunately”, because until fairly recently, most Democrats seemed determined to live up to their reputation as a weak, timid, and feckless bunch of elected leaders whose hearts are in the right place, but whose message and actions are stuck in (depending on their age) either the Obama years or the Clinton years. Heck, a fair few of them seem to be stuck in the Reagan years.
In early March, I wrote in advance of Trump’s big address to Congress about the many ways in which Democrats could take advantage of the moment, do something new, and protest in a meaningful and lasting way. The most they could muster — besides one member in his late 70s heckling and waving his cane at the president — was the silent raising of tiny protest signs, as if they were bidding on furniture at an estate sale for American democracy.
Thankfully, though, an increasing number of members of Congress are showing signs of life. I wrote earlier this month about New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s superhuman 25-hour speech protesting a series of executive branch nominations, and the shot in the arm it gave to those opposed to Trump’s actions. Booker’s monumental effort, of course, took place on the Senate floor — as “Washington” as it gets. But since that speech, we’ve witnessed a series of actions all centered around a different but just as fundamental part of the job of a member of Congress; one that usually happens far away from Washington.
Constituency service — sometimes called "casework" — is a very non-Washington set of job responsibilities. Put simply, it’s about members of Congress helping people back home in the district they represent deal with the federal government. It can mean helping someone track down missing Social Security payments, speeding up a delayed veterans’ benefits claim, getting help with immigration paperwork, or even securing a grant for a local project. It also covers smaller things like arranging tours of the Capitol, sending congratulatory letters, or getting a flag flown over the Capitol for a special occasion. These actions are all meaningful to different degrees, but they’re also symbolically important: they are acts intended to strengthen their relationships with the people they represent, and to show those people they’re paying attention to their needs.
In this way, constituency service is a form of what in political science we call dyadic representation: that the pairing (or “dyad”) of the member and the constituents in their particular district are the relationship that really matters. In my case, Rep. Mike Simpson’s job is to pay close attention to, and take actions to support, the people who live in Idaho’s second congressional district, and nobody else. We’re the ones who put him in office, so if we’ve got a problem, it’s his job to be responsive and fix it. It sounds basic, but as we’ll explore later, it’s not always a given.
Typically, on-the-ground constituency service pops up when there’s a problem. When the federal government is doing its job and delivering its services effectively and efficiently, most Americans tend to forget it’s there.1 But when it’s messing up royally — or messing itself up intentionally, as its been doing the past few months — constituents notice, and often need their member of Congress to make a phone call or otherwise raise a stink about it so they can get back to living their lives.
This brings us to Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland who I’m willing to bet most of my readers couldn’t have picked out of a lineup of white dudes in their mid-60s two weeks ago. Van Hollen is not who you would typically call a “fire breather”, or a big national name outside of those who closely follow Democratic party politics.2 But he is the senior Senator from Maryland, and as a result, it’s a big part of his job to tend to his constituents. So even though we might not have been able to identify Van Hollen a few weeks ago, it shouldn’t be surprising that he responded so dramatically when one of his constituents — Kilmar Abrego Garcia of Hyattsville, MD — was abducted by the federal government and illegally deported to El Salvador, where he’s been kept in prison despite no formal charges being filed against him.
By now, Abrego Garcia’s case has been national news for awhile. But the constituency service that Sen. Van Hollen undertook a couple of weeks ago is one major reason why. During a state visit by Nayim Bukele, the president of El Salvador (where Abrego Garcia is still being held), Van Hollen made a major promise to help his constituent out: “I’ve requested to meet with President Bukele during his trip to the United States, and – if Kilmar is not home by midweek – I plan to travel to El Salvador this week to check on his condition and discuss his release.”
Van Hollen didn’t just plan on it — he did it. Bukele denied Van Hollen the meeting, the administration kept dragging its feet (while insisting without evidence that Abrego Garcia is a dangerous gang member), and the Senator made good on his promise. Four days later, Van Hollen had not only gone to El Salvador, but secured a meeting with Abrego Garcia to assess his condition.
The trip made national headlines, drew significant attention to the administration’s malfeasance, and has arguably had a major impact on public opinion. Abrego Garcia is still in El Salvador, but the administration has backed off on other deportations thanks to court orders, and there are signs the tide is turning on the public opinion side. Thanks to
’s excellent polling data efforts, we can see that Trump is now underwater on public approval of how he’s handling immigration, which has pretty much always been the issue on which he’s most popular. It’s impossible to know exact causes, but it’s worth noting that Trump’s biggest recent plunge on this issue began a week ago on April 21, almost immediately after Van Hollen’s visit.Senator Chris Van Hollen was a relative unknown before this. He does not draw huge crowds to raucous rallies; he’s as average as could be on the “charisma” scale; and he’s a white guy in his mid-60s. He is (and I don’t mean this as an insult!) about as milquetoast a politician as one could imagine. In short, Van Hollen has none of the traditional markers of a politician with the ability to break through the noise of national politics — and of Trump’s megaphone in particular — to make an impact. But with one extraordinary act of constituency service, Van Hollen told a simple story in a way that counted: my constituent is in trouble in a big way, and I’m here to help.
You may not have heard of Chris Van Hollen before a couple of weeks ago, but there are other members who most of you probably have heard of; members with national reputations, big audiences, and megaphones which they can (and often do) use to accomplish their political goals. And over the past few weeks, some of these members on the Democratic side have been using these national megaphones to ironically, but very effectively, undertake their own kind of constituency service. They’ve been able to make an impact thanks to the impact their Republican colleagues are purposely not making.
A few weeks ago, Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC), the chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee, publicly advised his Republican colleagues in Congress to avoid doing in-person town hall meetings in their districts, where constituents typically gather to meet and greet members, and occasionally give them a piece of their minds. Since then, only a few Republican members have ignored this advice and held these meetings anyway. It hasn’t usually gone well for them: voters are fired about about the Trump administration’s actions (as they were in 2017 when Trump first attempted to repeal Obamacare), and are not afraid to let loose on members about tariffs, DOGE actions, and even about Abrego Garcia and other immigrants ejected from the country without due process.
With Republicans abandoning their in-person town halls, Democratic politicians, often from nearby districts, are stepping into the breach. Minnesota Governor and last year’s Vice Presidential nominee for the Democrats, Tim Walz, launched a national tour in March in which he visits Republican districts around the country and answers voters’ questions about the goings-on in Washington. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have done the same with their “Fighting Oligarchy” Tour, which just recently made a stop next door to me in Nampa, Idaho. So has another charismatic House-Senate pairing, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida.
In this nontraditional sort of constituency service, Murphy, Frost, and the rest are engaged in another model of representation we talk about often in political science called surrogate representation. Voters aren’t feeling represented by the elected officials of their home district or state — in this case, because they won’t hold town halls or are actively hacking away at the separation of powers — and other electeds are stepping in to provide that listening service. Chris Murphy and Maxwell Frost have never been on the ballot in North Carolina, where they were holding their town hall in the photo above. The folks in the room will never get the chance to vote for them (unless either of them run for president, and frankly neither would surprise me if they did one day). But in holding these town halls, they’re at least offering a kind of substitute, or surrogate, constituency service.
I do want to be careful not to be too sanguine or naive about these efforts. Constituency service is typically nonpartisan, boring stuff like locating a lost social security check, or sponsoring a constituent who wants to attend one of our military academies. Even though I’d argue that the Democrats’ actions in these instances really do meet the definition of constituency service, there’s no sense in pretending like they have no partisan undertones or political motivations. So long as Republicans continue falling into lockstep behind the president, this fight is necessarily, definitionally, a partisan one.
Are Van Hollen’s visit, or the impromptu town halls in Republican districts, “just theatre”? Yes, of course it’s all theatre. These are stunts designed to draw attention to the unpopularity of the administration’s actions, and to push public opinion in the direction it seems, increasingly, to be going in.
But this stuff is theatre because of the sense of duty most Americans expect from their elected leaders: to represent them by literally showing up for them at a place and a time. Unless they went for 25 hours straight like Cory Booker, very few would note or pay attention to a bland speech in front of the White House by Bernie Sanders or Tim Walz, listing Trump’s many offenses apropos of nothing. Certainly nobody would have showed up for a Chris Van Hollen stemwinder a few weeks ago (no offense, Chris). Instead, by connecting their actions with the fundamental duty of constituency service that members of Congress are supposed to do well, these folks have begun to turn the tide in a fight that’s only just beginning.
I’d be so bold as to argue this is a good thing! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go a full day without grinding our teeth over what the federal government has done in the last 24 hours?
Van Hollen has the interesting distinction of having chaired both the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee over the past two decades.