An Open Letter to My Representative

I just wrote a letter to my district's U.S. Representative here in Georgia, and I wanted to post it here. Obviously I don't expect a reply - they must get thousands of these every day. Still, I felt compelled to do it, and feel better for it. The full text is below.

I wanted to take a short moment to express my dissatisfaction of your vote yesterday in H.R. 1586. While I do not agree, on a personal level, that the executives in question should be receiving bonuses, I do not think the U.S. Government (i.e. YOU) should be using legislation to punish someone for following the letter of the law. As you heard time and again on the floor yesterday, the only reason these bonuses were even being paid was because of the verbiage in the stimulus bill passed weeks ago. I never once heard a valid response from the Democratic side in response to these charges, whether from Frank or anyone else.

It frustrated me to see that Georgia was split specifically down the party line, with Democrats (including you) voting Aye and Republicans voting Nay. Do I need to remind you that you're not being kept there to represent your party; you are there to represent US.

Your vote may or may not be representative of the population at large, but if so it is because they are angry, hurt, and in general misinformed about how things like this come to pass. You can't legislate things like this with knee-jerk reactions to raw emotions. This bill lasted all of a day from conception to voting. We pay you to exhibit levelheadedness and in general be non-reactionary to things that come up day-to-day.

I would have preferred that you, as a body, came out and said "You know what? We messed up, folks. We were a bit too hasty with that bill, and we fully admit that we weren't able to correctly process it in a manner that suited its complexities. We know you feel it is not fair for these bonuses to go out, and that is a sentiment we share. However, in lieu of treading on our Constitution, we have to abide by the law. We can not, and will not, craft legislation in order to punish someone for doing what we told them they could do. We should have caught it, but we didn't. We're sorry."

A pipe dream of mine would be for you to continue:
"Furthermore, in an effort to amend for our carelessness, we are voluntarily reducing our salaries by a collective amount of $165 million in order to make up for the bonus money we let get away. This is to be effective immediately. You can rest assured we will do our very best to make sure something like this never happens again."

Would that have been too hard?

Please feel free to use any of the above text in sending your own letter if you wish. (You may need to remove the Georgia part if you're not from here...) Here is the URL for writing your representative:

https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml