You are wrong. I used to work for a very senior Member of Congress. First of all, as the politician, you never pick up the phone. Your interns or Staff Assistants do so.

Second, staff talks to each other all the time (they work in a bullpen like setting) so they are always aware of the issues that are reaching the office, especially if it happens in volumes. Interns report these calls to their managers, especially since they have to ask for instructions on how to deal with them.

Finally, any staff member worth her salt will write a memo to the principal to inform them of such campaigns.

What happens when one of these campaigns continues after the principal has been informed of its existence? What if it continues for weeks?

"Sir we're getting all these calls about this sopa thing. They're automatic but there's a lot of them and they're all different. Its starting to tie up our phones."

...is a hell of a lot better than "no mention at all about that entertainment lobbyist's bill I rubber-stamped and then never heard anything about. Must not have been important."

Maybe...except people in congress have private lines which they use to communicate to the people they need/want to talk to. The public lines are only used for constituent and other public calls. So really what you'd be doing is blocking their constituents from calling them.

So the congressperson isn't losing any calls they needed to take and the only person being punished is their secretary. In the worse case scenario that congressperson could have a bunch of constituents who object to SOPA and you'd be blocking those calls with your own (which the congressman couldn't care less about if you aren't in their district)

I could see how if this starts happening for a lot of issues and becomes a popular thing, they would make this sort of thing illegal.

That sounds great for the telemarketing and political system, to me! I tire of calls about my political stances on random issues... as well as telemarketing calls.

I believe many of these staffers keep tallies of calls and their topics, so it could still have some impact. Making the calls unique is definitely a good way to keep them from being ignored.

I was thinking the same thing. If it's as effective as their robocalls to me are, then they will have zero impact.

On the other hand, at the very least, it will give them a sense of the volume of those willing to do something like this in opposition to SOPA, even if they don't listen to it completely.