Congress better than public thinks, say scholars

by Frank James

As we keep reporting, polls shows Congress is held in fairly low esteem by the American people, with the latest Gallup Poll, as Mark Silva wrote earlier, showing Americans giving it an 18 percent approval rating.

It could theoretically go lower, say if House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) were discovered running an illegal dog-fighting operation. But public approval of Congress is clearly close to bumping along the bottom.

This may be a case of public unfairness, at least according to an assessment titled "Is the Broken Branch on the Mend? An Early Report on the 110th Congress" by scholars at the progressive Brookings Institution: Sarah Binder, Thomas Mann and Molly Reynolds.

Their take is that there have been some substantial achievements by the Democratic-controlled Congress that aren't getting enough credit from the public.

The problem, according to the report, is that Congress is catching the diffuse blame for much of the unhappiness Americans feel about the direction of the nation, the Iraq War, the economy and more.

A mid-August Gallup poll revealed that only 18 percent of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing, matching Gallup’s lowest recorded rating (from March 1992) of the first branch of government. But this measure largely reflects a broader public discontent with the direction of the country, the war in Iraq, the state of the economy and the performance of the president. Democrats correctly point to polling evidence that while Congress as an institution gets low marks, the public also rates the Democrats substantially higher than the Republicans on almost every important public issue and prefers to maintain the current majority in power.

A more promising way to evaluate the performance of Congress is to assess the extent to which the new majority has delivered on its promises.

The report continues:

Congressional oversight of the executive branch has intensified under Democratic rule, especially in the House, following years of inattention and deference by their Republican predecessors under unified government. Serious contesting of the executive branch, mostly through oversight, may be the most notable achievement of the 110th Congress. In contrast, congressional oversight increased modestly in the Senate but not at all in the House during the first seven months of the 104th Congress, led by a new Republican majority.

In the most recent congresses, with the permanent campaign fully entrenched, the number of purely symbolic measures has jumped dramatically. Overall, however, the number of bills signed into law by the president declined from 1993 to 1995 and again from 2005 to 2007. This is not surprising given the shift from unified to divided party government in each instance.

The new Democratic Congress has fared less successfully on major legislation enacted and signed into law before the August recess than did the Republican Congress that preceded it in 2005, but far better than the Republican Congress that took up the gavel in 1995.

Democrats’ accomplishments this year have included implementation of the 9-11 Commission recommendations, lobbying and ethics reform, a temporary expansion in the administration’s authority to wiretap suspected terrorists with limited court review, an increase in the minimum wage, reform of foreign investment rules, a competitiveness package encouraging scientific research and innovation and a number of major initiatives and new priorities embedded in its continuing and supplemental spending bills. Although immigration reform foundered in the Senate, Congress has made significant headway on many of its domestic priorities, including energy policy, children’s health insurance, college student loans, Head Start, drug safety and a farm bill.

Such efforts remain works in progress, with action awaited in the Senate or conference and several presidential vetoes threatened for this fall. How many of these measures are signed into law by the end of the first session of the 110th Congress will determine the legislative productivity of the new Democratic majority.

In comparison, although 2005 was a difficult year politically for President Bush with the collapse of his Social Security reform plan, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the growing opposition to the war in Iraq, the Republican Congress managed to enact new laws on class-action lawsuits, bankruptcy, trade, energy and transportation before its August recess. Still, the Democrats’ legislative harvest has been bountiful compared with their Republican counterparts in 1995, who found their “Contract with America” stymied by opposition from the Senate and the president.

The report goes on to give Congress high marks for putting the brakes on earmarks and increasing transparency although the scholars say lawmakers could have gone further.

But the promise of Democrats to make their control of Congress more open to the minority than was the case during Republican rule has largely not worked out. In the House, for instance, when new newly in charge Democrats opened the process so legislation could be amended on the House floor under what's called an open rule, Republicans offered bills meant to exploit Democrats in vulnerable districts, according to the report.

The analysis was made public yesterday with Congress's return from its August recess. It's authors held an event at the National Press Club which included Norm Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute who with Mann wrote a book about the dysfunctional Congress called, you guessed it, "The Broken Branch," published last year.

Ornstein made the fascinating point that one of the Democrats' biggest obstacles in in accomplishing their agenda is, ironically, President Bush's weakness. A strong president would have political capital to spend, and would be able to provoke enough fear to get enough members of his party join enough Democrats to get compromise legislation through Congress. But that isn't Bush's position.

"The fundamental reason for the inability of the parties to work together in this profound moment of opportunity is the fundamental weakness of the president. Approval ratings hovering in the 20s and low 30s, embattled by an unpoplar war and by a succession of scandals among other things. And, of course, the Exhibit A in this case was the president's strong desire to have as his centerpiece achievement in domestic affairs this year a comprehensive immigration bill. And basically not even being able to get a third of his own Republicans in the Senate to support his bill, barely a quarter.

It's the weakness of the president ironically that has stymied Democrats's abilty to move forward with much of the legislative product more than anything else."

So if Congress's Democrats don't get as much as they want done, blame Bush, was the message.