Meeker is a fellow working on the Connecting to Congress project at Ohio State University's Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability.
I worked for a member of Congress from 2016 to last year and saw a lot of town halls in that time. The constituent questions in those days — the before times — usually fell into predictable patterns. But when I started working on a new form of virtual and deliberative town halls during the coronavirus pandemic, I was startled to hear an entirely different kind of question.
"What should you do if you are ill and it is not Covid-19?" a person in Oklahoma asked in April. "Is it safe to go to any emergency room?" In California in August, it was: "What is the best type of mask we should wear?" In Massachusetts in October, one teacher asked what she should do to protect her students if the windows in her building didn't open.
The questions weren't just about public safety, but also economic survival: In April, a small-business owner in Florida asked, "My bank has not submitted the application to the SBA. What options do I have now that there is no money left?" And from countless constituents, over the entire summer: I'm having trouble reaching my state's unemployment office. What do I do?
For all Congress' abysmal approval ratings, constituents still go to their own House members for information they can trust. Our town halls have been a perfect example of this: Understanding the confusion over rapidly changing guidance, members showed up to provide trusted and nonpartisan information. And, central to our research, it has not been just one-way: Our town halls have been two-way streets, with members both pushing out helpful information and taking in helpful feedback and direction from their constituents.
Our work during the pandemic shows Congress can and should play a vital role in making sure the country gets necessary information in a crisis. As a report from the Congressional Management Foundation noted recently, in this type of emergency our House members and senators may be the only reliable conduit of information from the federal government to state and local officials.
However, these members remain captive to a technology ecosystem that requires them to stretch limited budgets to do even basic outreach and event work.
Let's look at some barriers Congress faces to fulfilling its role. A good town hall requires both good outreach, to reach a broad group of constituents, and good logistics, to ensure the event is worth attending and no one gets turned away by a technical mistake.
A House member's annual budget is about $1.4 million. That money has to cover staff salaries, rent for office space in their districts, operations, outreach, equipment and services including technology.
No one hands new members lists of their constituents' names and addresses. Those must be purchased, usually from the same company that sells software to handle constituent mail, casework and more. And there are only a handful of approved vendors, driving up the cost. And what's for sale are lists only of registered voters — at best, about three-quarters of each member's 700,000 or so constituents.
In addition, the vendors charge several thousand dollars to stage virtual meetings with constituents — so-called tele-town-halls. The district where I used to work had 38 cities and towns. The cost of holding a virtual town hall in each would easily top $150,000 — or (looking at congressional averages) about three full-time caseworkers.
And, aside from a few clunky live poll options, these platforms are not set up for real discussions between members and constituents. The technology dictates minimal two-way interaction, and our data show that does not enhance voters' long-term trust in their House members.
All this means holding a town hall is a choice with big tradeoffs — when it should be an expected matter of national service.
The House's Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress this year made several recommendations for improving constituent communication and modernizing technology. Based on our experience hosting town halls during the pandemic, we would add four ways to improve tele-town-halls:
Money. Set aside money for each member to run accessible town halls, separate from the regular member budget. (Members wishing to do more or more specialized town halls could use their regular budgets.) To encourage more nonpartisan events and bipartisan collaboration, provide extra money for bipartisan town halls with members of both parties.
Mail. Standardize and subsidize the constituent contact information members have access to, including an opt-in system for Postal Service residential information that goes beyond voter files.
Tech. Improve House technology so members have expanded options for tele-town-halls. The proliferation of videoconferencing software during Covid makes us optimistic that more flexible, agile and deliberative systems can be put to work.
Training. Improve education for the House on new models and best practices for town halls.
Members across the country are pushing the envelope for what is possible with a deliberative, congressional town hall. We applaud these efforts, and hope that the House will continue to support its own evolution into the 21st century.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.