Lee Hamilton

Columnist

This past summer, Republican and Democratic members of Congress alike returned to their home districts and, in one of the great pageants of democracy, held multiple town halls on their home turf, welcoming one and all to bring their questions, concerns, and challenges. It was a stirring display of the kind of face-to-face exchange that strengthens civic engagement and allows elected representatives to carry the unfiltered priorities of their constituents back to Washington. Only, of course, that’s not what happened.

Instead, a handful of members of Congress held town halls this summer, while the vast majority avoided them.

That’s because there was considerable unrest back home about the course of events in Washington, and most news coverage repeatedly dwelt on unruly, fractious crowds and heated exchanges between audience members and their representatives.

Looking on, many people dismissed town halls as inconsequential political theater. Let me be blunt: That’s just plain wrong. Those few members of Congress who did hold town meetings deserve our thanks as citizens. Those who sidestepped them, whether out of concern for their image or on the advice of their leadership, should be abashed.

Here’s why. For starters, most people never get a chance to set foot in the Capitol or speak to a member of Congress.

A town hall erases that distance: Voters can stand up, ask their representative questions without some staff member standing in the way, and gauge for themselves what they think of the answer.

Town halls turn politics from an abstract process into an actual relationship for a few hours — and they make the people who attend them more likely to keep paying attention and to remain engaged.

So even if a gathering is likely to be tense, when politicians show up, listen, and try to present the best arguments they’ve got for their actions, they are signaling respect for constituents’ voices and, more importantly, for the representative democracy that put them in office in the first place. Likewise, avoiding direct encounters — or hand-picking one’s audience — risks eroding Americans’ rightful belief that representatives should be accountable to the people instead of being insulated, unrepresentative elites.

Politicians at the federal level get lots of chances to control their interactions with the public: They put out statements, appear on friendly media outlets, and rely on focus group-tested talking points. A town hall forces them out of that protective shell.

It does something even more important, as well: When ordinary citizens gather in a room, they discover shared concerns.

I may come because I’m distressed by rising health premiums or runaway prices at the supermarket — at a town hall, that gets echoed. My private concern, it turns out, is actually a public issue, and the town hall gives ordinary people a chance to hold their leaders accountable, not just rely on journalists or watchdog organizations to do it. In the best circumstances, neighbors leave with the sense that they can work together, not just complain individually. This is how we build civic energy and participation.

This summer, critics pointed at disorderly town halls as evidence of their futility. I saw something different: meetings that proved that Americans still cared enough to show up and demonstrate their investment in the direction of their communities and country. That’s much better than a silent room, a representative who never shows up, and apathy and disengagement.

In fact, town halls, even unruly ones, strengthen representative democracy because they are unscripted, open, and unpredictable. They remind us that our government belongs to us, and they remind representatives that their authority isn’t rooted in their party leaders or their donors, but in the votes of the people back home.

That doesn’t strike me as an exercise in futility.

Though I’m a firm believer that Congress should be in session longer than it often is these days, one of the silver linings of members’ time off is that it offers more opportunities for them to get home and engage with the communities they represent. The next time they’re due back home for an extended period, let them know you want to see them in person. You’ll learn something, and so will they.

Lee Hamilton is a Senior Advisor for the Indiana University Center on Representative Government; a Distinguished Scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies; and a Professor of Practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.