Hill Overwhelmed by Calls After Obama Speech

Congressional websites down, too
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 26, 2011 10:46 AM CDT
Hill Overwhelmed by Calls After Obama Speech
As a rain moves in, the Capitol building is reflected in a pool of water on Capitol Hill in this file photo.   (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Looks like voters are taking President Obama up on his exhortation to call their congressmen. In a speech last night Obama urged Americans to contact their representatives and push them to strike a debt ceiling bargain. By this morning the congressional switchboard was so overwhelmed that it sent an email to congressional offices warning that “due to the high volume of external calls House telephone circuits … are near capacity,” resulting in occasional busy signals, the New York Times reports.

That’s not all. A host of legislators, including John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, Rand Paul, and Mike Crapo, all saw their personal webpages go down following the speech, the Huffington Post reports, though they were all back in working order by 2am. Of course, there’s no way to know for sure what the people calling and visiting these pages are saying, but it may be telling that neither Harry Reid nor Nancy Pelosi saw any disruption on their webpages. (More debt ceiling stories.)

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