This is so silly. First of all, Congress has low approval ratings among Democrats (26%) because we are angry that Congress hasn't been aggressive enough to end Bush's insane, neverending occupation and impeach him. Obviously we won't vote for Republicans, anyway.

Secondly, there are still Republicans in Congress and surely their obstructionism and slapping the face of the majority of the people in this country would bring down the ratings for Congress overall. Duh.

Thirdly, nationally, the Democratic Party has a favorable 54% / unfavorable 37% rating vs. the Republicans favorable 40% / unfavorable 50%.

The bottom line - things aren't spectacular for the Dems right now, but at least they're not Republicans! I have zero doubt that the Dems will gain seats in the House and Senate in 08, but it will be funny to hear desperate Republicans pretend these numbers are in any way good news for them. Cuz they ain't.

The steadily slipping public approval of Congress is a harbinger of even worse things to come. George Bush, and the Republican Congress that mindlessly enabled every last one of his costly, counterproductive adventures, should rightly share the responsibility for the current mess. The public, however, is in no mood to make fine distinctions. To the public Congress is Congress and the current one happens to be nominally controlled by the Democrats, who now face indiscriminate popular wrath.

Wait till the 2008 elections. If the Democrats sweep them, they are going to wish for the happier days when they were in the minority -- because the wide and deep do-do the Republicans have left behind is going to take time to clean up and, once their 15-minute honeymoon with the Democrats ends, the American people will hoist the responsibility for the ongoing mess squarely onto Democratic shoulders and, come next election, go Republican again.

The cycle of Republican crime and Democratic punishment keeps going and going ..

Pretty pathetic article focusing on approval ratings. To get an idea of what could happen in 2008 please take a look at the results of the generic ballot question in the various polls.

more likely, a huge percentage of voters now see little difference between what happened today

That is exactly right.

The Democrats have to do better in opposing the President's policies without destroying the government.

They would probably do this best by demonstrating how GW Bush's lies and bad decisions are demeaning the Office of Presidency.

We just cannot live in the world, as it is now, when the President says, "truthfully," everyone stops to listen to what whopper is about to proceed from his lips. GW Bush endangers the prestige of his office every time he makes a public statement.

The American public, as well the world public, no longer believe GW Bush. This is because his statements have gone from malapropisms to threats and lies. It is intolerable that GW Bush be permitted to abuse the dignity of the Presidency in this way.

The Dems would do well to campaign strenuously against GW Bush's abuse of the prestige of his office.

Mr. Kane, your article says two groups disapprove of Congress, so you left out the third and largest group -- Republicans. For no reason other than partisanship, almost all Republicans disapprove of Congress simply because Dems control it as of January 2007.

Had you begun your article with your third-to-last paragraph, you would have been closer to getting it right. The Democrats didn't "do nothing"; they stopped King George-the-Lesser from doing more damage, if only for a couple weeks. Remember the Bolton appointment to the UN, and countless judicial appointments? We don't need any more of George Bush's unilateral appointments.

Yes, we -- that is, most of the country -- wanted the Dems to take charge and clean house. And yes, we are frustrated at the lack of spine they've shown in opposing Bush and in moving their own agenda forward. But don't confuse low Congressional ratings with anything even approaching support for Bush or his fellow rubber-stampers.

The only poll that matters will come in November 2008. If the Republicans still control any branch, well then we deserve the government we get.

14% of Independents approve of the job Congress is doing compared to 27% who approve of the job Bush is doing. Bush at least accepts he's unpopular and deals with it, whereas most in Congress don't seem to have a clue what low regard voters actually hold them in.

I for example view most members of Congress as little more than "prostitutes" who sell votes and influence instead of sex - except in Congress they also sell their staff's influence as well as their own. I do however respect Congressional staff who someone have to make Congress work in spite of incompetent, arrogant and corrupt bosses.

There is not a dimes worth of difference between the two parties; other than the wedge issues of guns an gays.
Clinton passed the free trade that sent the democrates packing.
Present democrates refuse to enforce our laws
Bush got an AG who thinks waterboarding is not against the law in spite of the fact the court has already ruled.
So anytime we are able to remove either one from office we doing the country a favor.

Low approval ratings reflect the fact that Reid and Pelosi just don't get the fact that voters don't want compromise with GOP policies because Republican policies are viciously anti-American (Military Commissions Act, Patriot Act, warrantless wire taps, obliteration of checks and balances etc) and in most cases, they are oblivious to the needs/wants of the people of America (Iraq War, failure to capture Bin Laden, gutting the Federal bureaucracy to prevent it from doing its job, damaging the US military capabilities, increasing world terrorism, etc). We want the ideals they were spouting at election time, just a very few years ago.

People should be upset at the job congress is doing. Look at some of the bad stuff. Take Nancy Pelosi's unauthorized trip to Syria. She probably violated the Logan Act and the Constitution. Her intention was to circumvent the official position of the Executive branch. Then Harry Reid says "the War is lost," undermining the surge which had barely begun. President Bush said many times about giving him clean bills to sign, not those load with pork. He gets a load of pork and he vetoes and Democrats act surprised. More time is wasted when the Democratic leadership asks for 40 votes on withdrawing troops, micromanaging the war or condeming the surge. And how many hundreds of wasteful hearings were held whose main purpose was to discredit the administration.

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan blames President Bush and Vice President *** Cheney for efforts to mislead the public about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of a CIA operative.

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, McClellan recounts the 2003 news conference in which he told reporters that aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were "not involved" in the leak involving operative Valerie Plame.

"There was one problem. It was not true," McClellan writes, according to a brief excerpt released Tuesday. "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president''s chief of staff and the president himself."

Mr. Bush''s chief of staff at the time was Andrew Card.

ITS SO FUNNY, EVERYDAY WE HAVE MORE AND MORE OF THEM COMMING FORWORD TO SAY THE TRUTH..

AND OUR TRUSTED CONGRESS STILL DOES NOTHING TO GET THESE SCUM BAGS OUT..

WHAT WILL IT TAKE AMERICA, PLEASE SOMEONE TELL US AMERICANS..

lobbyists... money... corruption... power.
Democrats AND Republicans are BOTH guilty.
what is it going to take to change this??
i don't even know who to vote for anymore.
ugh...

Your article was just one more mindless Fox News-like right-wing hit-job, Mr. Kane. You and Fox continually twist the truth to make it appear that Democrats are 1) doing nothing in Congress, and 2) that the American people are fed up with them. As it was stated elsewhere in other comments, Americans are ticked off with the Democratic congress only because they've been unable to get past Republican obstructionism. But it is abundantly clear from the polling data, if you'd been honest enough to highlight them, that by a strong plurality Americans want the Democrats to control congress, and that the Democrats' approval rating in congress is substantially higher than that for the Republicans. Yet your article tries hard to make it seem as though that's not the case.

It is so sad to see the proliferation of this sort of twisted truth in Washington Post reporting, and the rise of conservative ideologues masked as journalists and senior pundits (David Broder). Is it any wonder that WAPO's readership is declining?

The country will always disapprove of Congress when one senator can stop the progress of a bill dead. Blocking is not a democratic process and should be stopped by a rule change in the Senate.

if there were not a rule against profanity, you can bet I'd be using it. Why is no one calling attention to the obstructionist veto from the White House? How can we call to task a so-called Democratic congress that cannot accomplish anything because of this reality? If a party does not have the numbers needed to over-ride a veto, then it is virtually without power. Yes, there are compromisers among the Dems (shame on them for the most part)BUT most of them deserve kudos for trying. I can only hope that the electorate will understand this and vote a stronger Democratic majority into both houses. Thank you.

These sessions are this congress acting at its most effective. They can't be blocked by the Republican minority and they are preventing President Bush's bypassing "advice and consent" with recess appointments of some truly awful appointees.

Truly, after all this cause and effect talk, WHAT is the problem? The dems know the most urgent problem before them is finding a set of BIPARTISAN measures and resolutions(solutions?)TOWARD ending (eventually) the war.One party can't go it alone. Playing power politics with a man like Bush is, I believe, their first failure. The guy is never gonna back down on the war appropriations issue. Bush vetos it because he needs to float that war appropriation boat on the only excuse(schedule for withdrawal)he has for continuing the war until he can leave it to the dems in 08. By his veto,the GOP can "prove" its exclusively partisan patriotism to our troops as their provenance. The GOP and DEMS are being stubborn and adversarial and neurotic about their fall from grace; they are too busy and hell bent on the "pay-backs" to begin any "pay-offs" thereby making this the agenda, not the war. Egos and power become a toxic stew and are the failure of 2-party systems.Congress is focused on grabbing power instead of sharing it.They don't know how (or want)to play fair and smart.

Until members set their minds to working as a team; being less counter-intuitive; and committed to becoming more responsive to the challenges this nation faces we are, for intents and purposes, at a deadend. Shouldn't we, at least, be at a crossroads?

The Democrats are prohibiting George Bush from "playing" with our government by making appointments he knows will offend officials who have displeased him. Bolton is one example. Jim Webb and others are preventing this silliness by keeping the Senate open. When you are dealing with a child's mind, you must manipulate as they do. Bush is like a ten year old with keys to the family's car.

If "We the People" would only take over our rightful duty to vote inteligentlyk we would have a Congress that would be more responsible to "Us".
The ones that do vote are less than 50% of those eligible. And it is 51% of those that put those who sit in the seats.
"We" have only ourselves to blame.

The complete lack of accountability by both parties sickens me. The last time our country had this kind of greed and abuse of power we had a different kind of party.

Anyone for Tea?

In recent years I have come to believe that all statistics and polls related to politics have been "fixed around the objective", which is to make us believe something that may not actually be true. I for one am furious for the collapse of our constitutional form of government. Clearly Bush and Cheney have committed crimes against humanity, crimes against our Constitution and international obligations. Clearly the Law of the land requires the Congress to begin impeachment proceedings. It is not listed in the Constitution as an optional course of action, it is an obligation to the People, and if Pelosi and the others declare that "impeachment is off the table" there can be only one conclusion: she and the others are accomplices in the illegal activities of this administration. They can't begin impeachment without getting their own crimes exposed in public. We ex-Democrats believe in our country, it's Constitution and laws and expected, however naive that may seem now, that the Democrats in Congress would do what the Law requires them to do and nothing less. What they have done is simply nothing. In the words of the great speaker and humanitarian, George Bush, "Fool me once, you fool me... fool me twice... you can't fool me twice... anybody want some pork rinds?"

I think that it is really odd to fund a government weapons development project from an emergency funding bill. They should be a line item in a regular appropriations bill.

Even the outgoing head of the military's Joint IED Defeat Organization -- a task force that develops anti-bomb technology -- has gone public with complaints. Montgomery C. Meigs, a retired Army general, warned this week that the funding shortage would force a halt to the group's activities.

"I will no longer be able to fund any new initiatives or new projects," Meigs said Monday in a rare briefing with reporters. "What I cannot fund today will not go into the field next summer or fall."
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Wouldn't cost of personnel be in the regular budget? It's not like we can't count them. Is anyone expecting a surprise jump in the number of civilians working for DoD?

Is anyone keeping an eye on this? What other spending been thown in? The whole thing seems suspect, when the administration starts throwing the hundreds of billions around. 165,000 X $100,000= 16.5 billion dollars and a good bunch of
them are leaving. Add as much to pay contractors who save us money compared to the troops. We've "accounted for" $33B. Where is the other 165 billion going? Not having the troops in the regular budget implies that we are laying them off as they come home. Anybody believe that?