Republican leadership tells party to stop holding public events – what impact will that have?

After Roger Marshall, a senator from Kansas, was hounded out of his own town hall event last week, Republican party leaders had had enough. Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, and Richard Hudson, the chair of the GOP’s fundraising body, decided the embarrassment had to end, and they told Republicans to stop holding the public events.

But while that might save some Republican politicians from public humiliation, it could also deprive Americans of opportunities to interact with their elected officials, experts said, and prevent people from letting their representatives they are not happy with the increasingly divisive direction of the Trump administration.

“It’s certainly a unique view of representation that representatives should hear only from constituents who agree with them,” said Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington.

“But it’s entirely in keeping with the recent direction of the Republican party: to become more and more extreme because they listen only to their far-right base.”

Johnson and Hudson’s edict came after several Republican town halls were interrupted in recent weeks. Scott Fitzgerald, a four-year congressman, faced an angry crowd at an event in West Bend, Wisconsin, in late February. Fitzgerald was repeatedly booed as he defended the role of Elon Musk, in particular.

Apparently misjudging his audience, Fitzgerald said Musk is “getting rid of the DEI”, to loud jeers, before receiving a similar reaction when he praised “the fraud and abuse that has been discovered” by the department of government efficiency.

A video from TMJ4 showed attendees carrying signs including “Presidents are not kings” and “No cuts to Medicaid”. Glenn Grothman, also from Wisconsin, received similar treatment at a town hall a couple of days later, being loudly booed as he claimed that “across the board [Trump] has done some very good things”, including birthright citizenship and – using the same phrasing as Fitzgerald – “getting rid of the DEI”.

Marshall fared even worse. He left a public meeting after 40 minutes, the 64-year-old senator telling a hostile audience: “If you’re rude, which you’re being, I’m going to leave,” as he defended Trump’s extraordinary row with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy a day earlier.

That was apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back, as Johnson and Hudson rushed to their party members’ aid. While some Republicans, including Fitzgerald, have suggested they may buck party leadership, plenty will likely be relieved to use the screen provided by their leadership. But there are concerns about how this will affect Americans’ democratic rights, especially as the cancelling of town halls comes after Trump began to deny highly regarded news organizations access to the White House.

“President Trump’s insistence on choosing which reporters get to travel with him and attend press conferences is in keeping with [this] effort,” Hershey said.

“I think the people who wrote the constitution would argue that this is exactly the kind of behavior the American revolution was fought to stop.”

She added: “Town halls are not the only way that constituents can express their views to representatives. But they are a meaningful way: not every citizen can access Zoom, and expressing our views in person is an important way of conveying a depth of feeling that isn’t as easily expressed in a letter, an email, or a visit to a representative’s staff member.”

In issuing his town hall order, in a closed-door meeting, Hudson compared the atmosphere to town halls during Trump’s first term in 2017. Then Republican town halls repeatedly turned contentious as the Trump-led party sought to strip down the Affordable Care Act. There is a neat earlier precedent in the anger that erupted at Democrats’ town halls in 2012, as the Tea Party movement, seen as precursor to Trump’s Make America great again movement, disrupted Democrats’ public events in protest against the Affordable Care Act, which, according to the department of the treasury, has helped nearly 50m Americans access health care.

Daniel B Markovits, a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Columbia, has published research on congressional town halls with fellow academic Andrew J Clarke. Markovits said that while there is no legal obligation for members of congress to hold town halls, people could lose out if Republicans follow through with their threat to limit in-district appearances.

“A huge amount of what members of Congress do is non-partisan case work. It could be like: ‘There’s a problem with my social security check’, or: ‘I have trouble with whatever government agency,’” Markovits said.

“A lot of this is done through staff, but sometimes it happens at town hall. So in common times, a lot of town hall questions are: ‘Here’s this problem, I want your help. I want you to interfere on my behalf.’ Or: ‘There’s a road broken in town.’ So there’s a lot of very clearly non-partisan business that happens at these things.”

Members of Congress are not popular in the US. A poll in 2013 found that Congress was less popular than hemorrhoids, cockroaches and toenail fungus, and there is little to suggest the law-making body has gone up in people’s estimations since then. That could become worse if politicians are seen as becoming more out of touch with their constituents – something a lack of public interaction could exacerbate.

“There’s a lot of research saying that voters live in a bubble, which I think is true. But I think we shouldn’t understate the extent to which politicians can live in a bubble too,” Markowits said.

“And there’s some good work showing that politicians don’t have the best understanding of their constituents’ beliefs. So I think one of the things you might see if these [town halls] stop happening, you might expect members of Congress to overstate, maybe even more than they already do, the extent to which their voters are agreeing with them.”

Trump and Johnson have claimed, without evidence, that “paid troublemakers” are responsible for their members’ poor reception at town halls, something Democrats, including Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, have denied.

“We don’t need paid protestors,” Jeffries said in a post on BlueSky. “The American people are with us.”

Some local Democratic parties have encouraged members to attend town halls and air concerns, while Indivisible, a progressive activist organization formed during Trump’s first term, has listed events and sought to highlight some of the more contentious aspects of both the Trump presidency and the Democratic response.

The organization, and others, are now planning to hold “empty chair town halls” in Republican districts – where they invite members of Congress to attend public forums, and hold a discussion anyway if they do not.

“People who choose to go into public service, and have as your job that you are paid to represent other people, part of that job is talking to those people that you represent. And if you don’t like to do that, that’s okay. You can go become a lobbyist, you can go and do something else. Nobody is forcing you to represent other human beings in the United States Congress,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible.

“But if you want to have that job, you’ve got two choices. You can show up and defend your positions, or you can hide and we’ll make sure people know you’re a coward.”