WAUSAU, WI (WSAU) — 126 people were in attendance at Thursday’s town hall meeting in Wausau last night, but none of them were the elected officials invited.
Citizen Action of Wisconsin held the meeting focused on the Affordable Care Act and invited both Rep. Sean Duffy and Sen. Ron Johnson at their offices in Wausau and Milwaukee, but neither chose to attend.
Jeff Smith is an organizer for Citizen Action and he said that since there weren’t any town halls scheduled on the issue, they made one themselves.
He said, “I bet you could ask everybody in here and they’d start telling you, and telling the Senator and the Congressman, quit playing with people’s lives and using them for political fodder just to get votes.”
“These are the sorts of things that anyone elected should expect to happen,” said Smith. “If they’re not willing to actually schedule places in public where they can be heard, or people can be heard by them, then we’ll probably keep scheduling them for them.”
Smith also said he wants to get the offices of the Congress members involved in planning a future event.
The event seemed to attract only those in favor of keeping Obamacare as law. Smith said that was due to the quick nature of the meeting’s organization.
“As you know, with Facebook and emails, we end up talking in a chamber,” said Smith. “We would like to break out of that bubble, no doubt about it, but this idea occurred on Monday when we realized there were no town halls scheduled, and so we had just a couple days to get out the word and we did the best we could.”
Senator Tammy Baldwin was not invited to the meeting. Smith said that organizers already knew her stance on the issue, and were looking for further answers from the Republicans as to what comes next.
