I read with interest the cover story on Rep. Heath Shuler in your April 11 issue [“Shuler’s First 100 Days”]. Shuler is quoted as saying, “We work hard on every issue … Our light is the first on in the morning and the last to go out at night.”
Really? Then how can he explain why a letter I sent him asking for his help (in getting a reply to my letter to [the] Social Security Administration) took a month to be forwarded to his Asheville office, where nobody there could get any action?
All it would have taken was a phone call from his office in Washington, D.C., to the Social Security Administration in Baltimore. Instead, a lot of bureaucratic paper shuffling and buck passing [had] the result that nothing—zero, zip—[has been] done for three months now.
I ask: What’s going on? I don’t care if, as the article said, he is located in a fifth-floor cubbyhole in the Cannon Building. Surely he has a large staff [and] at least one telephone, and somebody there could have made a simple phone call to help me out! Or, is he just a younger copy of Charles Taylor, who didn’t answer letters either?
— John Kelleher
Brevard
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