On a Friday afternoon in March 2025, more than 30 people stood outside Trent Kelly's district office on Seventh Street North in Columbus, Mississippi, holding signs at passing traffic.

One of the signs read: "Honk if you support Ukraine." Another said "Cutting Medicaid is murder."

They had been showing up every week. The organizer, Annis Cox of Columbus, told the Commercial Dispatch the group had more than doubled in size since the previous week. Here's how she described why:

"(What unites us) right at this second is probably all the time we've spent irritated in our hearts and our minds about stuff that was going on and not having a place (for them), besides ourselves and our families, our echo chambers – but a lot of times you're singing to the choir. Now … the people driving by, they can see us and they can say, 'Yeah.'"

One of the regulars, Fred Kinder, had been there since the protests started on February 28. What frustrated him, he said, was never hearing where his own congressman stood until a roll call came out.

"It's about time that somebody took a stand. … I think Trent (Kelly) should hold a town hall meeting."

He was not the first person in Columbus to ask.

They started by asking nicely. In 2017.

This is not new. It has been going on since Kelly's first full term.

In January 2017, more than 20 members of a community group called Columbus Action Together walked into Kelly's Columbus office at noon on a Friday. They were worried about the push to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They were not there to shout. They were there, the Dispatch reported, "to make an appointment to have a town hall-style meeting with Kelly."

Twenty-one of them left their names and phone numbers on a sign-in sheet.

"This was just to make an appointment to have a face-to-face meeting, and it makes an impression to have a strong group show up … rather than just individuals," one member, Bridget Smith Pieschel, told the Dispatch.

Another organizer, Melissa Cooper, said what she wanted to ask was simple: what will replace the Affordable Care Act, if anything?

The group specifically said they didn't expect Kelly to be there — Congress was in session. They just wanted a date on a calendar.

Paul Howell, the district director in Kelly's Tupelo office, called Smith Pieschel that afternoon after the group left and stayed on the phone about 45 minutes. According to her account, he could not promise when the group would be able to meet with Kelly.

Kelly himself was at a Republican conference in Philadelphia and could not talk to the Dispatch by press time. He answered by email, through his communications director:

"Constituents have been complaining about the Affordable Care Act since it became law. That's why we in Congress are making it a top priority to solve the problems in healthcare."

That was the answer to "what will replace it."

One of the women asking had a specific reason

The Dispatch talked to Rachel Gamache, 58, of Columbus. She had lost her pharmacist job the year before and moved to town. Her husband was on Social Security and Medicare. She had signed up for coverage through the Affordable Care Act — about $80 a month — while she waited for a job to open in her field.

"It's been really helpful. We live comfortably with the amount of money we have."

She wanted to know what would happen to that. The statement from Philadelphia was the answer she got.

Then his party made the dodge official

In March 2025 — the same month those Friday protests were growing outside his Columbus office — Republican leadership formalized the avoidance.

At a closed-door meeting on March 4, 2025, National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Richard Hudson told House Republicans to stop holding in-person town halls. His suggested replacements: tele-town halls and Facebook Live. The reasoning, as NOTUS reported it, was to avoid the spectacle of booing and jeering after videos of angry constituents confronting Republican members went viral.

We wrote about that directive — and about what Hudson did on his own tele-town hall, where he told constituents the Medicaid cuts were "just rumors."

So the pattern in Columbus wasn't an accident or a scheduling problem. Not answering was the strategy. And Kelly's district is one of dozens where you can watch it work: constituents ask, nobody answers, and eventually the only place left to say something is a sidewalk.

What they wanted to ask him about turned out to matter

The 2017 group wanted to know what would replace the Affordable Care Act. The 2025 group was carrying a sign that said "Cutting Medicaid is murder."

In July 2025, Kelly voted for Trump's budget bill. Roughly 714,600 Mississippians — about 24% of the state — were on Medicaid in 2024. Analysts project the law will add about 115,000 Mississippians to the uninsured by 2034 — 28,000 of them in Kelly's own district.

Nobody in Columbus got to ask him about it first.

He isn't the only one, and that's the point

Across the country, Republicans have spent this cycle running the same play. Bob Latta's constituents held two town halls for him in 2025 and talked to an empty chair. A 90-year-old has stood outside French Hill's office every Thursday for a year. John Carter's last in-person town hall was in 2013.

Mississippi's 1st District belongs on that list. In 2017 the answer to a room full of raised hands was a statement emailed from a conference in Philadelphia. By 2025 the asking had moved to the sidewalk.

The job description

A staffer can return a call. A press office can issue a statement. The one part of this job nobody can do for you is stand in a room full of the people who hired you and take a question you didn't pick.

Trent Kelly has been in this seat since 2015. His constituents have been asking for that room since 2017.

In March 2025, Cox said she intended to keep the protests going — noon to one, every Friday, on the sidewalk outside his door.

Source

Abigail Sipe Rochester, "Weekly protests outside Rep Trent Kelly's office grow in size and message," The Commercial Dispatch, March 15, 2025.