Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff
If public opinion matters, this is without question the absolute worst Congress ever.
A record-low 9 percent of Americans believe Congress is doing a good job. The corollary, of course, is that 91 percent do not.
That's simply an astonishing consensus, and is one of the major stories of our time.
The most startling and telling breakout fact from the Rasmussen poll is that among independent voters, only 3 percent think this Congress is doing a good job.
That's tantalizingly close to unanimous.
This is the most serious indictment of Congress in memory. Making it an even more spectacular insult is the fact that no discernible scandal was necessary to bring on this sweeping censure. No big stories of abused franking privileges or pages, no lobbying outrages fresh on the mind.
Nope, this is a denunciation of the strongest sort of Congress' failure to merely do its day-to-day job with any degree of adequacy.
Combined with a president who has only stoked the fire on the runaway federal spending train, failed to secure our borders and is seen as having mismanaged both foreign (Iraq) and domestic (Katrina) affairs, the supposed greatest country on Earth seems rudderless at the moment.
In the midst of the nation's most severe and intractable energy crisis and economic downturn in decades, we have no coherent energy policy; instead, Washington goes a half-inch out on a limb and throws our own money back at us in the form of tax rebates to keep us quiet.
It's hush money. And it isn't working. We won't hush up -- even about the hush money. With a $9 trillion national debt, and tens of trillions more in future costs for Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare -- the funding for which our "leaders" have no idea where it's coming from -- those fun little tax rebates you got this summer came out of your children's future paychecks.
Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have done their best to run the institution into the ground since taking over in 2007. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have been obsessed with de-funding our troops in the battlefield (which they failed miserably to do, thank the heavens), and with sniffing the White House trash for whiffs of scandal. No one outside the Beltway cared about Scooter Libby, and the "scandal" over the fired U.S. attorneys was a made-for-television tempest in a teapot.
Meanwhile, as Americans see no end to high fuel prices and inflation, Democrats oppose every form of energy exploration known to man that shows any short-term promise. Their energy policy: Let's keep sending hundreds of billions of dollars for oil to hostile nations, but let's not expend any military might to keep the flow coming.
In truth, though, both parties are failing America. Republicans had their chance when they controlled Congress and the White House and they blew it utterly, ending up spending more than any combination of Democratic and Republican Congresses and White Houses in history. Nice job, folks.
Partisanship worked when there was principle behind it. Statesmen from both parties could disagree civilly about policy and ideology and let the chips fall where they may. They believed in something.
Today, however, 72 percent of Americans believe members of Congress are only out for themselves and not for the country. How sad.
Indeed, Washington's feverish partisanship these days is fueled not by honest disagreements but by hatred and ambition and leverage and paybacks and doing whatever must be done to preserve their own power.
Truly, that's the creeping scandal behind these record-low approval ratings.
