At congressional town halls across the country over the past few weeks, Republican members of Congress have been met with anger from voters over the hastily applied cuts to federal agencies and mass layoffs led by Elon Musk and his U.S. DOGE Service.
The scenes, which have taken place in ruby-red districts from Georgia to Missouri, quickly prompted comparisons to the tea-party movement of the late aughts or the early years of Donald Trump’s first term, in which the opposition party rode waves of palpable voter discontent to improved margins in subsequent elections.
But those public displays could soon be coming to an end if Republican leaders have their say. The Wall Street Journal reports that Representative Richard Hudson, the head of the House Republicans’ campaign arm, warned members in a closed-door meeting on Tuesday that the protests will likely get worse and urged them to move away from in-person town hall events. Per Punchbowl News, the NRCC chair suggested utilizing tele-town halls, claiming that Democrats can use the in-person gatherings to stage a viral disruption.
While counseling members to avoid such scenes, Republican leaders are also downplaying them — and getting conspiratorial. During a CNN interview last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that Democrats are actually to blame for the rancor.
“The videos you saw of the town halls were for paid protesters in many of those places. These are Democrats who went to the events early and filled up the seats,” he said.
Johnson continued, “This is an old playbook that they pulled out and ran, and it made it look like that what is happening in Washington is unpopular. But I’m gonna tell you, Kaitlan, the American people are behind what’s happening.”
Last Monday, Punchbowl News reported that some of the protests appear to have been organized by MoveOn.org and Indivisible, two progressive organizations that stand in clear opposition of Trump’s and Musk’s joint ambitions. But there’s currently no evidence of paid attendees at these events.
It seems some Republicans have already had enough. On Saturday, Representative Roger Marshall of Kansas ended a town hall in his district early after being grilled on the recent federal cuts, calling the assembled crowd “one of the rudest audiences I’ve ever had.”
It’s not yet clear if congressional Republicans will heed their leaders’s advice. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Sunday that several Georgia members still planned to hold in-person town halls even after their colleague Rich McCormick’s event went viral in late February due to anger from voters in attendance.
