From Class to Cohen I

Working for Congressman Cohen offers an interesting insight into the dynamics of the Congressional office. Here at Rhodes I have taken a course specifically on Congress, which focused a great deal on how Congressmen interact with their constituents. By working at Cohen’s district office, I am afforded the opportunity to compare what I learned from the class to how the Congressman behaves in real life.
In the class, we talked a great deal about how Congressman are basically constantly campaigning, because they have to run for reelection every two years. In other words, almost every single action that a Congressman takes is most likely tied to gaining reelection in some way. This can be seen pretty clearly in monitoring how the Congressman acts. Whenever the Congressman makes a public statement, or takes a stance on an issue, there will inevitably be a torrent of calls into the district office to register public support for his position. Occasionally there will be people disagreeing with him, but in those cases it is usually pretty clear that they’re a Republican and likely would not ever vote for him anyway. The fact that most of the calls support what the Congressman is doing seems to indicate that Cohen has a fairly good grasp on public opinion in Memphis. By speaking out on events particularly relevant to Memphis, Cohen is able to appear close to his constituents, and thus capable of effectively representing them.
For example, a few weeks ago there was a mass sale of Schnuck’s grocery stores to Kroger, followed by the shutting down of many of those stores. In response, Cohen filed an appeal to the Court of Justice to determine whether or not this action breached any anti-trust laws. Now, it is almost certain that this appeal will be denied, but Cohen used this action to take a public stance on an issue that is particularly close to his constituents here in Memphis. After this happened, there was a flood of calls into the office relating their support for the actions that Cohen had taken. Many of the people were directly effected by the sale, because they were employed by Kroger or Schnuck’s. For them in particular, I could tell that the Congressman standing up for their position meant a lot to them. This is but one example of Cohen taking a stance for his constituents; there is usually at least one major issue that Cohen has spoken out about each week.