Don’t ruin democracy for others

While the U.S. Senate was in recess, Sen. Chuck Grassley became the first in Iowa’s congressional delegation to offer up the pound of flesh craved by angry Iowa leftists and hold public town hall meetings.

Will other members of Iowa’s congressional delegation follow suit? I hope so. Facing constituents in public isn’t the sole function of the job, but it’s an important one.

But Grassley’s March 21 town hall in Hampton, at the end of which activists lined his exit path shouting boos and hurling epithets — is a relatively tame example from the last decade in Eastern Iowa alone of how town halls can become more trouble than they are worth.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” said Speaker of the House Mike Johnson at a March 4 news conference.

What Grassley experienced at his town halls mimics the show of left-wing rage we initially witnessed in 2017, during the first term of President Donald Trump. Now in the Second Trump Spring, it plays out again: Incensed anti-Trump constituents issuing demands for their members of Congress to appear for a public berating, with some of those members giving them the time of day and some not.

Johnson and other Republican leaders have advised members to skip public town halls.

“They’re doing this for the cameras,” said Johnson of angry constituents and protesters flooding town hall meetings. “We all know it, and I think it’s wise not to play into it right now.”

The Washington Free Beacon reported on March 13 that Indivisible, a left-wing group funded in part by wealthy progressives aligned with Democratic megadonor George Soros, has offered to reimburse local groups up to $200 each for protest-related expenses including gas mileage and “cardboard depictions of your Member of Congress.”

Should any Member of Congress not hold a town hall quickly enough for the left wing’s liking, the $200 reimbursement can also cover costs of holding “empty chair town halls to spotlight their absence.” Inviting the media, of course, is strongly encouraged.

Indivisible will even reimburse activists for the cost of a chicken suit, according to their co-executive director.

(No, I am not making that up.)

here's our full toolkit. we reimburse for chicken suits!!! indivisible.org/muskorus

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— Leah Greenberg (@leahgreenberg.bsky.social) March 4, 2025 at 9:20 AM

That doesn’t necessarily make them “paid protesters,” as Trump and Johnson have suggested, but these antics certainly constitute protest — paid for with dark money, evidently.

Paid or not, what individuals and groups protesting at town halls apparently cannot understand — or are not concerned about — is that the larger and louder they get, the more they risk interfering with someone else’s right to participate in their own representation.

I first realized that during my pre-journalism days while standing outside a town hall held on March 17, 2017 by Sen. Joni Ernst. Sinclair Auditorium at Coe College, where the meeting was held on a weekday during business hours, seats almost 1,100 people. The “highly partisan” crowd filled the venue over capacity to the extent the fire marshal ordered the doors closed before all attendees made it inside. I was one of several dozen people turned away.

While I had campaigned for Ernst and my other federal representatives during previous election cycles, most of the others denied entry were, unlike me, not political activists. Some had never seen their federal representatives in person. Consigned to watching the livestream on mobile devices, most of them soon realized that many inside that crowded auditorium were there to lash out and treat the town hall as nothing more than an anti-Trump resistance rally (funded by taxpayers, at that.)

I noticed similar disgust two months later at then-Congressman Rod Blum’s town hall. Every constituent who showed up to the May 9 event in the Kirkwood Community College gym was able to get in, due in part to the staff’s decision to require RSVP, limit attendance to actual residents of the district and check ID.

Acquainted with a couple staffers, I was one of several people asked to help with checking IDs, a requirement to which I would ordinarily object. Thanks to Ernst’s March town hall, I had no qualms. My role that night positioned me right outside the door for much of the raucous meeting, allowing me to see how many constituents left early with troubled looks on their faces.

I need only one anecdote to illustrate the boorishness of the crowd at times during that May 9 town hall: A woman in a pink T-shirt bearing a slogan for reproductive rights yelled, “STAY OUT OF MY SNATCH!” from the very back row, where I happened to be standing next to her at the time.

(For those not up to date on every otherwise-innocuous word used as a vulgar term for genitalia, “snatch” is a euphemism for “vagina.”)

She shouted it at the top of her lungs, but only I and a few others actually heard it over the shouting from the rest of the crowd. I hadn’t heard what Congressman Blum had said to elicit such a reaction, but how could anyone when the audience’s yelling drowned out many of his answers?

“Some people just came here to disrupt,” one constituent told The New York Times that evening. “I wanted to know what he had to say, and why he voted the way he did. At least let him talk.”

Ernst held another town hall on Sept. 22, 2017 at the Iowa Memorial Union in Iowa City, where there was luckily enough space for what was once again a very large crowd. When my name was drawn out of a hat to ask a question, I asked the Senator if she would support reforms to public-sector collective bargaining at the federal level similar to what the state legislature had accomplished seven months earlier (and over which Iowa Democrats are still mad eight years later.)

My brother had been watching the meeting live on social media from his office in Cedar Rapids and sent an email to my mother and me with a grainy screenshot of the live feed. Depicted was Yours Truly, surrounded by a sea of raised arms holding up red placards to visually depict ardent disagreement.

“This is Althea getting booed at the town hall meeting,” he wrote. “Good job Althea!”

My memory of it is a bit hazy, but yeah, there was definitely booing.

Now, your friendly neighborhood opinion columnist and former political activist can take the heat — though attendees of the next Gazette Pints and Politics event on Apr. 10 should not mistake that as an invitation to do the same whenever the conservative columnist says something honest.

But on a more serious note, most people don’t have a thick skin or regular experience with public scrutiny in a live setting. Most don’t want to have to muster up their courage just to ask an honest question they think other people won’t like. Bravery (or shamelessness) shouldn’t a prerequisite for participating in a constituent town hall.

Most people I see shouting and heckling at town halls are there in groups. It’s easier to be rude and loud when your friends are next to you doing the same.

It amazes me how many people complain that their Members of Congress ignore them and their concerns only to waste their few real chances at in-person dialogue by shouting them down the whole time.

No one — be they progressives protesting at Republican town halls or Tea Party activists hollering about Obamacare at Democratic town halls in 2009 — accomplishes anything worthwhile when they weaponize the fury of an angry crowd to hijack the mood and the discussion at a town hall. That isn’t democracy.

What they accomplish instead is to ruin one of the most meaningful ways most constituents have to engage in it.

Just as sad is that most who seek an outlet to vent their political rage are the instigators of their own ire. The politically angriest people I know — on both sides of the aisle, I can’t stress enough — are all people who spend boatloads of time consuming social media, partisan political websites and cable news. Those platforms are nonstop, repetitive and designed to evoke anger.

Keeping you angry is what keeps you engaged on their platforms. But keeping you engaged on their platforms is what keeps you angry. None of it is healthy. And none of it makes you a better participant in democracy.

Congresswoman Ashley Hinson, who represents 22 counties including Linn in the Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, told The Gazette on March 7 that she plans to continue holding in-person town halls. Her office reiterated that in a Friday statement to The Gazette, saying, “Congresswoman Hinson has held an in-person town hall in every county every term, and that will continue this term. Her first round will be in the second quarter — those are being planned now and will be announced soon.”

Hinson is also hosting a telephone town hall on Wednesday, April 2 at 6:45 p.m., which was announced in her Friday newsletter.

So despite the advice of GOP leadership, at least some of Iowa’s members of Congress are choosing to engage their constituents in person in the near future.

The next question is how constituents will choose to engage their Members of Congress.

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