On March 4, 2025, more than 100 people stood outside the Lakeland office of Scott Franklin, the congressman for Florida's 18th District. One of them handed out flyers with his photograph on them under a single word:
MISSING.
The flyer's complaint was specific. Franklin doesn't hold in-person town halls in his district. He holds periodic telephone town halls instead.
What a telephone town hall actually is
It sounds like a reasonable accommodation for a big rural district. It isn't the same thing, and everyone involved knows it.
One protester at the Lakeland event put the problem in a sentence, as the Lakeland Ledger reported:
"I think when you use the telephone as a medium, the organizer has the power to control the speech."
That's the whole thing. In a room, anyone who got in gets to stand up. On a call the congressman's own staff runs, someone decides which questions reach the microphone and which don't. There's no crowd, no follow-up, no way for the person asking to tell whether their question was skipped or simply never chosen.
The Ledger added two details that make it worse. It had reported back in 2021 that Franklin held phone town halls without advertising the dates and times in advance. And his office does not appear to post recordings of the calls afterward — so there's no public record of what was asked or what he said.
Franklin's spokesperson, Corey Noble, told the Ledger the congressman "always welcomes this kind of respectful dialogue," and that he engages constituents through telephone town halls reaching roughly 50,000 available numbers across eight counties.
Fifty thousand numbers dialed is a statistic about the phone system. It is not a measure of whether anyone got an answer.
What people wanted to ask him about
The protest wasn't abstract. The flyer named DOGE directly, criticizing Franklin for backing the Trump-Musk cuts to the federal workforce.
Sarah Fortney, vice chair of the Polk County Democratic Executive Committee, described it in blunt terms at the protest: "They being Trump, unelected Musk and his band of hoodlums. So basically, the oligarchs are taking over."
The people showing up in Lakeland were doing the same thing constituents were doing across the country that month — trying to get a few minutes with the person who holds their vote in Congress, at exactly the moment his party was rewriting their health care and their food assistance.
Franklin, meanwhile, is not a backbencher. He is Vice Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and sits on its Military Construction and Veterans Affairs subcommittee. Appropriations decides where federal money goes. If there were ever a member of Congress worth an hour of a constituent's questions, it's the one who helps write the checks.
This is the pattern, not a Franklin quirk
Franklin is one of a long list.
Georgia's Austin Scott hasn't held a town hall since 2015 — so in March 2025, close to 200 people asked their questions to an empty chair with a blue blazer on it, outside his locked district office. California's Kevin Kiley gave more than 400 constituents a screened telephone call after they lined the halls of a county building trying to reach him. Georgia's Rich McCormick got a room full of angry voters in February 2025 and House Republican leadership told members to stop holding in-person town halls two weeks later.
The telephone town hall is the format that solves the leadership's problem. It looks like access. It produces no video.
The job description
The entire reason the House exists — the reason its members stand for election every two years instead of every six — is that it is supposed to be the chamber closest to the people.
Franklin's constituents printed his face on a missing-persons flyer because that's what it felt like. And his office's answer was that he prefers a medium where he controls who gets to speak.
He is on the ballot again this November. We deserve better.
Source
"Protesters target Scott Franklin, criticizing his town halls and support for Trump and Musk," Gary White, The Lakeland Ledger, March 5, 2025. Photo: The Ledger.
