Ben Cline won’t hold a town hall: So, his constituents held one for him

Ben Cline won’t hold a town hall, so a couple of hundred of his Sixth District constituents turned one of his low-key mobile office hours scheduled in Waynesboro on Thursday into the next best thing.

Cline, the Sixth District congressman-in-hiding, of course, wasn’t there – he was in DC on Thursday promoting his “No Welfare for the Wealthy Act,” which he says will close a loophole that allows millionaires to get food stamps.

And in case you were wondering, no, there’s nothing in the language of his bill about a certain paper billionaire whose wealth is entirely based on his ability to grift federal tax dollars.

But then, corporate welfare cheat Elon Musk once posed for a selfie with Ben, so, all good.

Since he was otherwise busy, Cline sent to Waynesboro in his stead two staffers who at least came with protection, in the form of armed Homeland Security officers.

For a mobile office hours event in the basement of a library.

Not Gestapo-like at all there.

It got interesting pretty quickly; constituents raised various issues with the recent unconstitutional and illegal actions and schemings of the Trump/Musk administration, a staffer promised to pass concerns along, and then, to gain some semblance of control, the staff decided to take small groups of five to an upstairs meeting room for more individualized meetings.

The sense of those who went through that process: “they did that to silence and intimidate us,” one participant observed in a chat with AFP afterward.

In case you’re wondering, Cline, safely back in DC, took to social media later to complain that the mobile office hours had been “hijacked by partisan activists,” stopping just short of pulling a Mike Johnson and claiming that the constituents on hand were “paid protestors.”

You know he wanted to say that.

It had to take every fiber of his being to not go there.

“The staffers on site, who are residents of the Sixth District, were subjected to what amounted to a Democratic campaign rally,” Cline wrote.

Nice try, but, no, Congressman, what your staffers were subjected to was the democratic process.

Those “partisan activists” that you like to belittle are taxpayers, as in, they’re the people who pay your plush $174,000 salary, plus the best benefits that anybody on earth can imagine having access to.

You owe it to them to meet them in person every so often, if you can fit them in around your selfies with Elon and recording podcasts with Jim Jordan.