Washington — Before the bricks, the big ole chunk of foam bread arrived. Baby pacifiers, fake prescription bottles, tea bags and, ahem, free copies of Hustler magazine also have come.

Thousands of Americans have paid $12 each to Send-a-brick.com, which mails the bricks and voter demands for stricter U.S.-Mexico border controls from Gwinnett to Capitol Hill. They're successors to a long line of people who have petitioned the government in funny, rude and weird ways the Founding Fathers never could have envisioned.

RICK McKAY / Staff (ENLARGE)

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) used bricks he received in a mini-wall, to show his support for stricter border controls.

IT'S IN THE MAIL 50,000 Pieces of mail processed for the U.S. Senate each day 400 Pieces of mail Sen. Johnny Isakson gets each week 2,500 Isakson's weekly faxes 10,000 to 21,000 His weekly e-mails About 40 Number of bricks Sen. Saxby Chambliss has received

American ingenuity stuffs the mail that arrives several times a day in the offices of Georgia's congressional delegation. The mailbags are packed with evidence of constituents' quirky concerns — and insistence that Congress address matters far beyond the bills and resolutions that now fill its days.

Then there are the anti-tax folks who sent tea bags as a reminder to lawmakers of just how far some Americans — most of whom don't live anywhere near Boston Harbor — are willing to go to make sure the government hears them.

"It certainly got their attention," Send-a-brick co-founder Kirsten Heffron said of her group's undertaking, which she called "an American effort" that crossed ideological and political lines. "But as far as changing the debate, that remains to be seen."

U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, a Sharpsburg Republican, heard from a constituent demanding he support "full disclosure" of secret government files on all UFOs and extraterrestrials. Then there was the middle school kid who wrote Westmoreland to protest his school's new dress code. The mandatory tucking in of shirttails, he said, violated his sense of personal style.

Rep. Phil Gingrey, a Republican from Marietta, has received enough DVDs documenting Sept. 11 conspiracy theories to start his own library. And the textile companies in his district occasionally send him socks and underwear. "New, thankfully," spokeswoman Becky Rudy noted.

Before Send-a-brick.com flooded Capitol Hill mailrooms with some 15,000 bricks since May, an anti-hunger group was sending fake bread and medical groups were mailing pacifiers and pill bottles. Publisher Larry Flynt sends all 535 members of the House and Senate free copies of his Hustler magazine.

The Georgia lawmakers have received their share of bricks.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a Moultrie Republican, got about 40. Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Marietta Republican, got about 20. Rep. David Scott, an Atlanta Democrat, got just one.

The bricks Gingrey received and those sent to Rep. Tom Price, a Roswell Republican, have been used to build mini-walls in their offices to, as Price spokesman Jim Billimoria put it, "show our support for controlling the border." Most of the bricks sent to Georgians will be donated to Habitat for Humanity.

The flow of mail to lawmakers has been slowed — and the system has grown more sophisticated — since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and, a month later, the mailing of deadly anthrax to the office of then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat.

The new system, which handles 50,000 pieces of mail a day for the Senate alone, now detects and irradiates suspect packages. Last June, an aide to Chambliss opened a letter, and white powder poured out. Fearing it was anthrax or some other toxin, the congressional mail operation shut down. The powder was found to be harmless, but Robert Wynn Young of Cartersville is now serving five years in prison for sending it.

The new mail system has forced some lawmakers to improvise in the way they handle once routine matters. Rep. Nathan Deal, a Clermont Republican, used to have all the bills for his district-office operations sent to Washington, where an aide would pay them.

Now, the bills are sent to Deal's Gainesville office, where they are collected and, once a week, sent by overnight mail to the home of the aide, who pays them from there.

"Otherwise, mail is two to three weeks in delivery, due to [irradiation]," said Chris Riley, Deal's chief of staff. "This process allows us to pay our bills on time."

On the bright side, the new mail system largely protects lawmakers from menus from restaurants, Publishers Clearing House offers to make them millionaires (most of the senators already are, anyway), and all those mortgage brokers promising a better rate.

But not all junk mail is blocked. Isakson's office gets "every specialized publication in the world." And Gingrey gets countless credit card offers addressed to Mr. Gingerly, Mr. Gingy, Mr. Ginney and, occasionally, Mr. Gingrich. Please note, junk mail guerrillas, it's Dr. Gingrey, Gingy or Ginney.

(Oh, and just a quick reminder for Bob Barr. Sure, you haven't been representing the Atlanta suburbs in Congress since 2003, but how about stopping by Gingrey's office to pick up some of the mail that's still coming in for you?)

Contacting Congress has become a cottage industry, thanks largely to the Internet.

Interest groups representing everything from families to libraries to wheat have Web sites providing members with the means and helpful hints they need to reach lawmakers. Some sites are dedicated solely to citizen-lawmaker communication. Congress.org promises to hand-deliver missives.

Georgia lawmakers report getting from 200 to 800 pieces of mail a week, though many more e-mails and faxes arrive. Isakson averages about 400 pieces of mail a week, but gets 2,500 faxes and between 10,000 and 21,000 e-mails in that same period, spokeswoman Sheridan Watson said.

Many experts thought e-mail would revolutionize citizen contact with Congress, particularly in the post-Sept. 11 world. But e-mail backfired, according to the Congress Online Project. Lawmakers who posted public e-mail addresses in late 2001 were deluged with e-mail, much of it spam, and overwhelmed aides actually took longer to answer e-mails than traditional letters, the project found. Within months, many lawmakers had shut down direct e-mail contact and now direct constituents to electronic forms on their congressional Web pages.

So what is the best way to make sure your congressman hears you?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a California-based public interest network, says the absolute worst way is to send the kind of form e-mails that many groups offer on their Web sites.

Besides visiting your congressman personally, the most effective way to get a congressman's attention is with an old-fashioned letter, the foundation says. It should be handwritten but legible. And, the group recommends, short. Lawmakers have a lot of other letters to open.