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| Wilson before Congress, 4/20/12 (LOC) (Photo credit: The Library of Congress) |
Not unpopular like a shy kid in junior high. Unpopular like the Ebola
virus, or zombies. Held in near-universal contempt, like TV shows about
hoarders with dead cats in their kitchens. Or people who get students to
call you up during dinner and ask you to give money to your old
university.
The latest Gallup poll gave Congress a 10 percent approval rating. As
Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado keeps pointing out, that’s lower than
BP during the oil spill, Nixon during Watergate or banks during the
banking crisis.
On the plus side, while 86 percent of respondents told Gallup that they disapproved of the job Congress was doing, only 4 percent said they had no opinion. That’s really a great sense of public awareness, given the fact that other surveys show less than half of all Americans know who their member of Congress is.
So little attention, yet so much rancor. We’re presuming that this is
because of the dreaded partisan gridlock, which has made Congress
increasingly unproductive in matters that do not involve the naming of
post offices.
And Congress is listening! Lately, we have been seeing heartening new
signs of bipartisan cooperation. For instance, the House and Senate are
near an agreement on the payroll tax cut, namely that it will continue
and not be paid for.
This is actually sort of a tradition. No matter who is in power in
Washington, Congress has always shown a remarkable ability to band
together and pass tax cuts that are not paid for. It’s like naming post
offices, only somewhat more expensive.
