A new Gallup poll out today puts Congressional approval at 14%.
FOURTEEN.
This is the lowest rating for Congress since the Gallup organization began polling Congressional approval.
From Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of The Gallup Poll in USAToday's Gallup Guru:
This 14% Congressional confidence rating is the all-time low for this measure, which Gallup initiated in 1973. The previous low point for Congress was 18% at several points in the period of time 1991 to 1994.
Congress is now nestled at the bottom of the list of Gallup's annual Confidence in Institutions rankings, along with HMOs. Just 15% of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in HMOs. (By way of contrast, 69%of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the military, which tops the list. More on this at galluppoll.com on Thursday).
It’s worth remembering that Congress is basically nothing more than a mechanism for the representation of the people’s wishes. We all can’t go to Washington. So we elect men and women and send them off in our stead. It’s not an optimal situation, it seems to me, when such a low percentage of average Americans have confidence in this system.
Rightly or wrongly, the approval rating of Congress is always attributed to the party in power. This new 14% approval rating belongs to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Jack Murtha and all the Democrats who claimed they received a mandate from the people in the mid-term elections last year.
If a mandate means pissing off the people who voted for you, then they're doing one hell of a job, aren't they?
See, they've angered the people who voted for them by totally chickening out on what they said they'd do over Iraq. They said they'd withhold funding and hold the President's feet to the fire---and they did neither.
Then, there's the illegal immigration "compromise" bill. Seventy percent of the American people don't want this legislation. The first iteration failed and the second version of that bill is now making its way through the Senate--and that's not making many people happy, either.
Hard to believe that approval of the 110th Congress is tanking, huh?
Sure, the Republicans aren't 100% blameless but, folks, they don't hold a majority in either house. The Democrats are the leadership in both the House and the Senate and--like it or not--that means this approval rating belongs to them. Polls are perception and perception is reality--in life, in business and certainly in politics.
Those who think that the Democrats may have a lock on the White House in 2008 may have another thing coming if approval of Congress remains this low.
If the GOP was in power, I'd be saying exactly the same thing.
Either way, this Congress needs to pull their collective heads out of their collective asses and start listening to the American people again.
William Smith
ConservativeBlogger.com
