Archive for May, 2006

Write Your Representative

Posted in Political on 05/31/2006 02:20 am by admin

Finding Your Legislators

Identifying Them

To find out who your US Senators are (you have two - there are two Senators per state), see the Senators-by-State list at http://www.senate.gov/senators/senator_by_state.cfm. You can also look this information up at the Project Vote-Smart Elected Official Biographical Information Database at http://www.vote-smart.org/ce/. The Senate also provides a directory at http://www.senate.gov/contacting/ with fairly complete contact information.

To find out who your US Representative (a.k.a. Congressman/woman) is in the US House of Representatives (you have just one - there is one Rep. per Congressional district, and each state has many districts) see WriteRep at http://www.house.gov/writerep/, which will allow you to look up your legislator by ZIP code and send them a message. You can do likewise with the form at the top of the House member web site lookup page at http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html or with the form below:


Enter your Zip Code and State in the fields below and click on Submit.
ZIP
+4
(if required)		 State

You can also look this information up at the Project Vote-Smart Elected Official Biographical Information Database at http://www.vote-smart.org/ce/.

When looking up by ZIP code, You should use the ZIP+4 format, because short 5-digit ZIP codes often contain more than one Congressional district. If you do not know your complete ZIP+4 code, both WriteRep and Vote-Smart have links to the US Postal Service site, at which you can look up your ZIP+4 quickly, then hit the “back” button on your browser to return to WriteRep or Vote-Smart.) The House site also provide lists of members at http://clerkweb.house.gov/mbrcmtee/members/housemem.htm (this resource will probably move to http://clerkweb.house.gov/107/mbrcmtee/members/housemem.htm in 2002), and links to legislators’ own web pages at http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html (it’s a start, but you should complain to the Office of the Clerk at info.clerkweb@mail.house.gov and urge them to produce a House equivalent of the http://www.senate.gov/contacting/ Senate list.) You can also use WriteRep (see above) for these purposes.

Sometimes it is important to target members of particular Congressional committees as well as your own “home” legislators. To do so, you may need to find out who the committee members are, though a good action alert will include this information. If you need to, you can check the list of House members by committee at http://clerkweb.house.gov/106/mbrcmtee/cmtees/standing/sc.htm (this resource will probably move to http://clerkweb.house.gov/107/mbrcmtee/cmtees/standing/sc.htm in 2002), and the list of Senate members by committee at http://www.senate.gov/activities/cmte-mem.html.

source: EFF factsheet: http://www.eff.org/congress/#finding