[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 16]
[House]
[Page 21518]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          DEMOCRACY MEANS YOU

  (Mr. PITTS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. PITTS. Mr. Speaker, my office, just like any other office here on 
the Hill, responds to thousands of constituent concerns each month. We 
spend a great deal of time responding in a timely manner to these 
letters, e-mails, and phone call requests; and this give and take is 
the hallmark of our democracy.
  Lately, I have been receiving more and more letters and e-mails sent 
by organizations supposedly on behalf of my constituents. One of these 
organizations recently sent a letter to my office from one of my 
constituents. The problem is that this constituent is a personal friend 
of mine who did not ask them to send a letter to me with his name on 
it. In fact, he did not even agree with the content of the letter. He 
simply signed up to receive e-mail updates. He told me in an e-mail 
last month that ``every week this group would send junk to the people 
on their list, and then ask you to forward it to your politicians. What 
a scam. I never forwarded any of that garbage.'' Yet one of those 
messages got to me with his name on it.
  It is outrageous that any group would send mass mailings to Members 
of Congress under false pretenses, deceptively putting someone's name 
on it without their knowledge or consent. We rely on the integrity of 
the mail so that we can reply in good faith; and when that good faith 
is undermined, it is shameful and a disgrace to the American democratic 
system.

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