I went to my first public townhall with an elected official last night

I was a nervous wreck. I spent a long time on the questions I wanted to ask. I ran it back and forth with my wife trying to evoke some sort of empathy from my representative.

Trying to get through to some sense of common ground.

I walked into the building it where the townhall was being held, Roswell City Hall. The rotunda was packed and I was glad Michelle gave me a reminder to get there early.

I checked in via the QR code and then had to submit my question via ANOTHER QR code. The process was that you were required to submit a question in advance and you would get called on if it met whatever criteria it needed to meet. I still don’t know.

I’ve never done this before. I don’t know what’s going on but I had a question I needed to ask and goddamn if I wasn’t going to jump through all the hoops they wanted to be able to ask it.

I grabbed a seat in the very back on the very outside in case I had to go to the bathroom or if I’m being honest more to give myself a route for when I chickened out.

The townhall was scheduled to start at 6:30. At 5:50 that the main room was full, so was the overflow and the fire marshal just did a lap.

I did not record the meeting. I wanted to be as engaged as possible and frankly there were plenty of people recording it including local news stations. I may get the exact wording wrong here but I am being honest in how I remember it. There is a full recording online that I’ve not watched yet available here

Community

My community evidently came to chat:

  • There was an unassuming old woman in front of me who pulled out a hand made sign that said “grow a spine, congress”.
  • A 17 year old Indian student stood up and asked why he, as a non-resident, who has lived here for 17 years of his life with excellent grades should be ineligible for the HOPE scolarship and other funds.
  • A woman with a very deliberate southern accent (who is evidently a direct decendant of Patrick Henry) asked if the congressman knew who Patrick Henry was and if he was familiar with a few of the quotes attributed to him. She then, with most excellent of overdone southern woman on a mission, say that imagine her surprise when our president called himself a king!
  • a teacher (I think) asked why kids should go hungry
  • a conservative guy asked why the conservative party was being so haphazard and anything BUT conservative. He wondered what the rush was…
  • a woman asked about conservation efforts

How it’s been going for McCormick at this point

McCormick, has already dug himself a hole at this point because he steadfastly refuses to answer the questions as asked. From the very start, he was getting no softballs. As I said, people were pissed and they said those exact words REPEATEDLY. Voices were cracking with that familiar nervousness those of us who have done public speaking pick up on.

Some were reading off phones or handwritten notes. Others stared at that man in ways that I can’t describe.

Every time he was asked a question, he felt the need to tell a story to frame what he was going to say. The crowd was having none of it.

Yes there were the gotcha people. I couldn’t help myself in a few cases and shouted myself. But for the most part, people were done with the bullshit and wanted answers and they wanted them with no ambiguity.

Foghorn Leghorn

McCormick is absolutely getting flustered by now. So when this lady with her intentionally dramatic but valid question asked him if he thought it was right that our president would declare himself king, McCormick did exactly what you would expect from a conservative white male politician: he acted like a dick.

So McCormick says “I don’t know if I can do as good a Foghorn Leghorn as you…”

Dear reader, this was not a good move. He then tried to go into some nonsense like “I know a bit about…” and the crowd was like “oh fuck not this time”. I think that line alone blew any good will he might have had left with some people. That or the stuff about kids working which I’ll get to in a bit.

So the crowd is yelling for a yes or no answer and he does the whole “I don’t know what the president said..”. The woman sitting two down from me stood up and screamed: “It’s on the official White House Instagram account! Take my phone and look at it!”

I recall these were regularly the points where his aides would move on to the next question without an answer having actually been given.

Some of the things that sat with me

McCormick is one of those bootstrappy-trauma addict types. I don’t know what to call them. The ones who are like “pain and trauma and hard work makes you stronger” blah fucking blah.

I just want to shake these fucking people and be like “You have some serious fucking trauma that is making you a horrible person. You are who you are IN SPITE OF the trauma not because of” it.

The day I heard that phrase (and I don’t know where I heard it now), levies broke in my soul.

Anyway so that’s who we’re dealing with in addition to the bullshit states rights local control libertarian contradictory nonsense. Oh and he’s a fucking spending cut hawk.

His kids

My god I feel so terrible for his kids but his (I think) youngest in particular. Someone asked a question about vocational education. I have mixed feelings on the topic but I do not have mixed feelings about how he talked about his own kid. So he starts of fluffing the trades a bit. Trades are good. We need the trades.

Then he starts with big tropes

Not everyone needs to go to college Kids are getting useless degrees

But then this bit of conservative negging on blue collar workers blended with absolute shit parenting:

I have one kid who’s in mechanical engineering. I have another who works in the defense industry (?). We need plumbers. I told my youngest to be a plumber. He didn’t need to be a doctor because plumbers make more than doctors these days. College isn’t for him.

As I said I may have butchered the quote but the sentiment was exactly the same. Two of his kids were sitting the front row including the “plumber” I think.

It broke my damn heart and if you can’t understand why a parent artifically limiting their child’s potential because of thier earning potential is a bad thing I can’t help you.

Fuck him sideways.

Everyone else’s kids

I didn’t know about his interview on CNN about school lunches coming in the door. One of the reasons I wanted to do this is to force myself to see these people in person. I can’t sit through videos of these people and I have had to trim my news consumption as a matter of mental health survival.

So I didn’t realize that in response to being asked about cutting funding for school lunches for kids that his answer was that teenagers should get a job?

Our expectations were really low but holy fuck

I can only hope that anyone reading this understands that the two things have absolutely zero bearing on each other.

So this comes up (from an educator no less I think). And he tries to be a bit smug like “oh this is about the interview…”

So he goes on a bit of a tirade that ends with “I think teenagers who can work should get a job instead of sitting at home”

At this point I want to praise my wonderful wife. Her father, who is a 100% Trump supporting boomer, said to her at some point in her life that “your job is to get an education”. My wife told me those exact words about our kids and told them that as well.

Education is criminally expensive. It is much more fiscally responsible for my kids to focus their energy on getting and maintaining good grades and using that to get scolarships than any job could help. We have 529 plans for each of them and what time they have during the summer not doing extracurriculars to add to college applications CAN be filled with a job if it works but honestly blowing off steam online with their friends is a good alternative too. They work hard.

So those words came welling up in my mouth and I burst out “my kids job is to get an education”. I don’t know if he heard it because if I recall correctly. He said something like “that’s what I believe and you’re not going to change my mind”

Again, let’s just, go back to the “what does that have to do with 8 year olds getting free meals at school?”. Does he legitimately expect that an 8 year old should be forced to get a job at night or something? What the fuck….

Conservation moment

At one point there was this weird exchange about conservation and the park service. McCormick likes to bill himself as a “conservationist”. It’s not, as far as I know, an official title that infers some particular skill so much as a shared perspective.

Anyway so someone yells something about him saying he’s a conservationist and that not aligning with DOGE messing with the park service.

Well are YOU a conservationist

The woman isn’t caught off-guard or anything but she definitely was having a gaslight moment so she says “no”; which by the way is a perfectly acceptable answer here because your calling out someone who claims to be something that doesn’t match the common understating of that thing.

A conservationist wants to conserve and DOGE is fucking that up. So yeah bro, wtf?

But he’s all cocksure that he got her or something. What a prick and the crowd did not like it one bit.

Ukraine

He was appropriately applauded when he stated support and that he supported Ukraine. He, predictably, would not call out the President for what he said only saying bullshit like “I disagree with other’s in my party on this”

AI

Holy fuck this man is seriously AI-pilled. I imagine he has some serious bromance for Elmo or something because he was trying to replace EVERYONE with AI. Every single topic - AI

Oh an “quantum”. yes “quantum” used exactly like people use “the cyber”. Fucking cringe

SAVE Act and voting

This was also a question I had (I submitted two). You can read more about it here. tl;dr: there is a LEGITIMATE concern that the provision around birth certificates and name matching would amount in predicatable fashion to voter suppression. Of which the largest group affected I think would be married women who took their spouse’s name in some fashion.

This is personal to my family. My wife has four different official ids and only two of them agree and neither of those is her birth certificate matching her legal name. When we got married she legally changed her name to “Michelle Jeanette Huffman Vincent” - appending my last name. Her Social Security card and passport have that name.

Her birth certificate does not. For reasons that most technical folks will IMMEDIATELY appreciate, her state driver’s license does not match either because of space….

So with that in mind, the next to last question of the night comes from a suburban white woman. She stands up and she’s shaking. She’s gripping her phone. And she’s looking down at it.

I apologize if I get this wrong. You can watch the video for yourself

Congressman, I live in district 7. I’m a citizen. I’m a tax payer and as of this moment, I am a voter

I want to pause here because this is that anime scene where the villian misunderstands the hero in a very fatal way. This woman isn’t going to save us but she’s the hero in this anime for the moment. What we mistake as nervousness, as uncertainty we now discover was actually white hot rage. I don’t know if this is a leopard’s eating face moment for her or not and I don’t care because the next thing she says is this

I say “as of moment” because when I got married I took my spouse’s name. My birth certificate does not match my legal name and id. The SAVE Act which you sponsored would strip away voting from some 21.3 million people who like me took their spouse’s name in some form.

Then she looked up from her phone and said staring directly at him:

I want to know why you are scared of me voting.

You can imagine the response in the room. Like I said. I’m not trying to make her a hero. I don’t know anything about her but this was important to me and I’ll take my allies where I can get them sometimes.

Predictably, McCormick hemmed and hawed and said shit like “that’s not in the bill” or whatever before finally shutting down the entire thing with “I don’t think that’s what the bill does”.

So the room is furious and he finally pulls out the absolute worst possible line you could at that moment:

I don’t have to be here

At that point he got a sympathetic softball question about the border wall or something and folks just walked out.

Me

I never did get to ask my questions. I was never called on and I’m okay with that because I saw my community asking the same questions. I was energized. I knew that other people were watching too.

I think a lot of my anxiety comes from feeling like I have to pay attention all the time. That somebody has to keep watch and not let them slip shit by.

It’s fucking exhausting and I can’t fucking do it. Last night I saw that there were others and they had the same concerns.

I could take a break and it would be okay. They could take a break and I’d watch.

I can’t wait for the next one honestly.