True,—This! Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanters wand!— itself a nothing!—
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Cæsars—and to strike
The loud earth breathless!—Take away the sword—States can be saved without it!
~Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton
They say that the pen is mightier than the sword, and while the sword has its place in revolution, the pen is available more readily to more people. This project aims to make it as easy as possible for American citizens to contact their elected representatives about important issues.
While I hope that Is Mightier may someday address many pressing issues facing our nation, the first issue that it will address is the fascist assault on the rights of trans people.
This project is only just beginning. I have several goals:
- Implement a means for a constituent to look up their current elected representatives. ✓
- Collect a database of pieces of letters that can be combined to create coherent letters so representatives are not bombarded with identical letters from multiple constituents.
- Make it simple to edit or customize a letter if a constituent wants to and then download the letter as a PDF.
- Match certain letters/letter parts in the database to particular bills and the representatives that are most connected to them.
The basics of this site should be fairly easy to put together. I hope to have the representative search done first, followed by some whole letters that can be personalized to a particular representative. I will start with Pennsylvania, as that is my home state, and then expand to states with the most dramatically awful pending legislation.
~ Update 6/20/2023: Representative lookup is complete. Basic letter construction works, but I am working on improving it. Once I know exactly how the system will build letters, I will begin writing (and potentially soliciting) the letter parts. ~
This site is Flask on the backend. It uses Google's Civic Information API to do representative lookup. The database is implemented in PostgreSQL.
I'm not looking for contributors at the moment, but, assuming this project gets some legs under it, I plan to solicit letters for the site. More letters and more authors means more variety as well as more passion.
- Congressional data from https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators
- StateFace font by ProPublica from https://propublica.github.io/stateface/
- StateFace replacement/prepend CSS by Paul Smith
- W3-CSS from https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/
