E-mails from public overload House Web site

Aug 13, 2009
By ANNE FLAHERTY

WASHINGTON (AP) - Amid a boisterous debate on health care reform, people flooded members of Congress on Thursday with so many e-mails that they overloaded the House's primary Web site.

Technical support issued a warning to congressional staff that the site - - may be slow or unresponsive because of the large volume of e-mail being sent to http://www.house.gov/.

Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the House's chief administrative officer, which maintains the Web site, said traffic data was not available and could not be released without the lawmakers' consent.

But anecdotally, he said, the spike in e-mail volume was widely believed to be a result of the health care debate. the rest