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Let's Clean Up Congress
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20192 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
2,036 Words |
| Author
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Donald Lambro
Donald Lambro is chief political correspondent for the
Washington Times. |
Stained by institutional corruption, scandal, and political hypocrisy that have corroded and weakened its very foundations, Congress is suffering its worst public disapproval ratings in modern American history.
Indeed, a growing belief is emerging among Americans of all political persuasions that Congress has failed to address many of the economic and social problems facing the country; that more than half the money it spends is wasted; that it has become a self-serving, politically unaccountable branch of government that is critically in need of reform.
When a recent national survey of voters conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm, asked who was "more to blame for the country being off on the wrong track," 41 percent named Congress versus 18 percent who named President Bush. The same poll, taken in October, showed that 64 percent of Americans disapproved of the job Congress was doing, up from 57 percent in July and far higher than its 38 percent job disapproval rating in 1981.
Certainly this anti-Congress attitude was powerfully reinforced during the ugly, highly partisan, and voyeuristic Senate hearing into sexual harassment charges against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Quite apart from the deeply emotional issues at the center of that bitter controversy, the public's revulsion was directed not at the principals in that tragic drama but at the sorry spectacle of the Senate itself. A Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that 60 percent of those surveyed strongly disapproved of the way the Senate conducted the Thomas nomination.
Not only was the Senate's clumsy handling of the Thomas nomination a national embarrassment of unprecedented proportions, it also was another reminder of the grimy levels to which the institutions of Congress has sunk.
Once a proud place of public service and lofty public policymaking, it is now seen by most Americans as a place where anything goes, where all too often cold, calculated ambition and politics come before the public's business, and where the pursuit of power and privilege is more important than the national good.
"My first thought about all this is that I'm damn glad that I'm out of there," former Sen. Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire told me in the midst of the
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