America needs town halls

Years ago, when I was in Congress, I found myself running a town hall meeting that included about 25 members of the Ku Klux Klan peppering me with anti-Semitic questions. Something interesting happened: Their persistent confrontational approach wore out the audience’s patience, and eventually the Klansmen left.

In this age of heated public rhetoric, it’s a reminder that fierce town hall meetings are hardly new. The challenge is not to avoid controversy; it’s to make it productive. In my view, whatever their tone, we need town hall meetings.

That’s because they are crucial for members of Congress and other elected officials to gauge the intensity of public feeling, hear from ordinary citizens and give people a chance to get to know their representative. They are democracy at the retail level.

During my decades in Congress, I came away from almost every town hall meeting with the feeling that I was engaging in a small part of democracy’s dialogue. Just as often, they reinforced my confidence in the fairness, decency and judgment of Americans. So as we look ahead to the next round of heated town hall meetings, let’s remember that they, too, help ensure that our representative democracy remains vibrant. 
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Lee Hamilton is director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years, representing southern Indiana’s 9th district. He was a Democrat.