Background
Scenario
Constituents are communicating with Congressional offices at record numbers forcing Members of Congress to pay ever more attention to the needs of those people in the districts they represent.
Some well-funded special interests are unhappy with this power imbalance, preferring to influence Congress without regard to constituent voices. They have formed a shadowy front group ironically called ‘Out of the Shadows’ operating under the guise of improving transparency in policy-making, but with a real goal to hobble grassroots activism.
‘Out of the Shadows’ is working with a number of Members of the United States House of Representatives to introduce H.R. 3, which would:
- Require all constituents who are recruited, trained, or are members of any trade association, society, or other third-party group to register as lobbyists before communicating with a Congressional office on related issues, and
- Require all employees of companies who may be advocating on issues that may benefit their employer or their industry to register as lobbyists before communicating with a Congressional office,
To help avoid a 1st Amendment challenge, the legislative language does the following:
- Requires no fee for registration and makes the process easy to complete online or via postal mail for constituents
- Puts the burden of reporting on the organizations for whom the constituent advocates (no civil/criminal penalties for individuals, only organizations)
- Puts all the burden of ensuring registration and reporting constituent lobbying solely on the organizations (organizations must report constituent lobbyists on quarterly disclosure forms complete with name and issue(s))
- Allows for ‘unaffiliated’ constituent lobbying without registration, but broadly defines ‘affiliated’ lobbying to include any communication with federal policymakers encouraged, prompted, or initiated by an organization through email, postal mail, telephone, text message, facsimile, social media, mobile app or website.
Goal
In response, you have formed the “Right to Petition” coalition. Your mission over the next 4 weeks leading up to the scheduled House vote is to organize and defeat this ill-conceived legislation. Your coalition will rely on the combined communications, lobbying, and grassroots expertise of your respective advocacy savvy organizations along with your ability to mobilize advocate voices from within your collected stakeholder bases.
Status
You are currently 8 votes short of the 218 votes needed to stop the bill when it comes up for a recorded vote on the House floor.
Opponent
Despite their ultimate goal of curbing constituent voices, the ‘Out of the Shadows’ group has formed a formidable grassroots activist base and gained the support of a surprisingly large and bipartisan group of Members of Congress. Many Members seem enticed by the promise of a reduced burden on their Congressional offices as they wouldn’t have to manage so many emails, petitions, phone calls, social media mentions, videos, and in-person constituent visits.
Rules Of The Game
- Each player/team receives 8 tokens of each color type (4 color types), 32 tokens total
- These tokens represent your campaign assets for the entire game
- You determine how many tokens and in which rounds you will use them
- Use these tokens to engage in tactics to gain votes toward the goal
- Each tactic is worth a certain number of votes in each round
- The tactics and the vote values change each round
- Each round represents 1 week leading up to the vote
- You may invest zero or multiple tokens on a particular tactic or tactics
- If you choose to invest multiple tokens, that represents how much you value the action, not how many times the action is carried out
- The more you invest, the more votes you may gain
- But be careful, each tactic is not valued equally
- Remember, the opponent is also investing in each round and on each tactic
- If the opponent invests more on a tactic than you do you may lose votes
- There are no negative vote values so you should play all of your tokens before the game ends