There is a particular way of holding office that goes like this: take the loudest possible public position, then arrange your calendar so that nobody can ask you about it.
Ken Calvert has been representing part of Riverside County since 1993. In February 2025, as Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency was firing federal workers by the thousands and cancelling grants across the country, Calvert sat down and wrote an opinion piece for the Orange County Register. The headline was not subtle:
It ran on February 12, 2025. He opened by predicting that "the hyperbole and dramatics from the left will only grow more frantic" as DOGE kept working.
Twelve days later, his own constituents showed up outside his Palm Desert district office.
"It's just another day in paradise"
That week, across the country, Republican members of Congress were getting an earful. Politico reported on February 24, 2025 that town halls in red districts had turned into shouting matches over Musk and the firings — and that almost none of the Republicans involved had changed their minds.
Calvert was among them. Protesters gathered at his Palm Desert office. Asked whether it had shifted his support for Musk at all, he told Politico:
"I'm used to it. It's just another day in paradise."
That is a genuinely remarkable thing to say about people who drove to your office to tell you they're frightened about their health care and their jobs. Not "I hear them." Not "I disagree, and here's why." Just: I'm used to it.
The empty chair
The protests didn't stop. By late March, constituents in Palm Desert had started holding what they called "empty chair" town halls — a public forum with a chair set out for the congressman who wouldn't come.
On March 23, 2025, KESQ News Channel 3 covered the second straight week of them. The organizer, Jared Milrad, who lives in Calvert's district, said he was worried about what was coming for Social Security, Medicare and Medi-Cal.
"We organize an empty chair town hall to encourage our Congressman to come forward and hear from his constituents," Milrad said. "Unfortunately, it's our second week doing this event. He hasn't come to our town hall yet."
The station asked Calvert's office for a response. Here is the full list of things his team offered instead of an in-person town hall:
- telephone town hall meetings held "last year"
- a Veterans Service Organization Roundtable
- a Senior Resource Fair
- visits with city leaders in the Coachella Valley about "their federal priorities"
- a roundtable with Riverside County healthcare leaders
- a promise of "additional telephone town halls"
Every single item on that list is an event where Calvert controls who is in the room, or where there is no room at all.
A telephone town hall is not a town hall. Nobody can see how many people are waiting to speak or who got skipped. Nobody can stand up. Nobody can follow up when the answer doesn't answer the question. The person running the call decides which callers get on the air, and no one outside can ever know what was screened out. That is the entire appeal of the format — and Calvert is far from the only one who has figured that out. In Arkansas, a 90-year-old woman stood outside French Hill's office every Thursday for 52 straight weeks asking for the same thing, and got telephone town halls instead.
Who he wasn't in the room with
It's worth being specific about who was on the other side of that empty chair, because "constituents are upset" is easy to wave off.
In the district Calvert represented at the time, according to the California Budget & Policy Center's February 2025 fact sheet:
- 84,800 residents relied on CalFresh — California's food assistance program — bringing $195 million a year in grocery money into the district
- 93,916 children — about 70.6% of the kids in the district — were eligible for free or reduced-price meals at school
- 96,330 tax filers claimed the Child Tax Credit, worth $220 million to families there
- 46,200 filers claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit, worth another $106 million
- 60.3% of renters were paying more for housing than they could afford
Those are the households on the receiving end of "waste, fraud and abuse." They are the ones who wanted twenty minutes and a microphone.
The appropriator who cheered on the people taking away his own power
Here is the part that should bother even people who liked DOGE.
Calvert doesn't just sit on the House Appropriations Committee. He chairs its defense subcommittee — one of the most powerful spending jobs in Congress. Appropriating money is the specific constitutional power the House holds over the executive branch. It is, quite literally, his job.
DOGE's whole method was to stop spending money that Congress had already voted to spend, without asking Congress. And Calvert, the appropriator, wrote a newspaper column saying it was doing "what must be done."
He then backed it with votes. On June 12, 2025 and again on July 18, 2025, Calvert voted for the Rescissions Act of 2025 — a bill that cancelled $9 billion Congress had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting. He voted to take back money his own committee had appropriated, at the request of a White House that had simply decided not to spend it.
An institution's power doesn't get taken from it. It gets handed over, by people like Calvert, who found it more convenient to be on the winning team than to defend the job they hold.
He's got a new district now, and still no room to stand in
In 2026, California's new congressional map drew Calvert into the same district as fellow Republican Young Kim, forcing two sitting incumbents to run against each other in a redrawn 40th District that sweeps from Orange County suburbs into Riverside County.
Which means a very large number of people who will be represented by Ken Calvert if he wins have never had a chance to ask him anything at all.
They can watch his television ads. They can read his op-eds. They can call a phone number and hope they get picked.
What they can't do — what people in his district have been asking to do since February 2025 — is stand up in a room, in front of their neighbors, and make him answer out loud.
Thirty-three years in Congress. The chair is still empty.
Sources
- Ken Calvert: DOGE is doing what must be done to protect taxpayers — Orange County Register, February 12, 2025
- House Republicans unfazed by protests: 'We're moving forward with the cuts' — Ally Mutnick and Lisa Kashinsky, Politico, February 24, 2025
- Community demands answers from Rep. Calvert at town hall — Shay Lawson, KESQ News Channel 3, March 23, 2025. Lead photo: KESQ.
