We have the Congress we deserve

 The US House of Representatives last week voted to sue President Barack Obama, claiming the chief executive has overstepped the limits of his powers.

The Republican-led House doesn’t like the way Mr. Obama enforces some laws and not others, and they specifically don’t like the way his administration has chosen to enforce parts of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) but not enforce other parts of the same law.

They have a point, and this column largely believes the GOP is right to be upset with the president on this. However, a lawsuit doesn’t seem like a very good way to handle things. The House’s most effective tool remains its control of the purse strings, and they should pull those strings tight every chance they get, effectively strangling any Obama program they don’t like. Congress putting on the breaks is probably the only way we’ll ever get the shackles back on our government.

Expectations of Congress doing anything right isn’t too high right now. In fact, CNN posted an online story Tuesday with the results of an informal poll. They asked their followers on Facebook and Twitter to describe Congress using only one word. More than 5,000 people responded, and “useless” was the number one response, followed by “worthless” and “joke.”

And it didn’t get any better after that. The next seven most popular responses were “corrupt,” “incompetent,” “lazy,” inept,” “idiots,” “selfish,” and “dysfunctional.”

A word cloud – a graphic representation of the most popular words – showed virtually no positive responses to the question. And some words made the top ten look like compliments. Consider these responses: “criminals,” “traitors,” “crooks,” “losers,” and “crap.”

The article quotes a NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist College poll this week that reports only three percent of voters as considering Congress “productive,” and another poll showing Congress with a 15 percent job approval.

Who are these 15 percent that are pleased with Congress? They need to have their heads examined and their voter registration cards taken away.

Typically, individual Congressmen and Senators get high marks from their constituents. The old “I hate Congress but love my Congressman” phenomenon has been prevalent for years in politics. However, CNN says the Washington Post reported that 51 percent of people now disapprove of their own representative’s job performance.

Results for individual members of Congress weren’t available, but I suspect that our own Mac Thornberry still enjoys a pretty high approval rating by Texans in the 13th District. He shares our values and votes the way most of us probably want him to. Your editor disagrees with Mac occasionally, but largely thinks he’s doing the best he can in a corrupt and broken system.

As a body, Congress is out of touch with the people it represents, has no qualms about ignoring the Constitution unless they want to beat the president over the head with it, and mostly serves to spend money we don’t have to fund a government that generally only makes life more difficult and more expensive.

You can blame it on gridlock if you like. You can point to the fact that Republicans don’t like Democrats and vice versa or that things are more polarized that ever in Washington. But the fact of the matter is things don’t seem to get better whether we have united government or divided government. The government itself is the problem.

Obama had his time with his party in control of both houses of Congress, and yet nothing much was accomplished other than a poorly written health care law that causes more problems than it solves. George W. Bush had his time with his party in power, and yet there were no great strides in rolling back government. The last Bush administration was a study in lost opportunities and, unfortunately, lost freedoms.

Some say that term limits are the answer to this vexing problem. A House full of inexperienced Congressmen, however, would put all the power in the hands of entrenched Congressional aides. The same thing has happened with the executive branch where bureaucrats are running the show largely without the president’s knowledge or permission.

The quality of our Congress and our White House won’t get any better until the people demand it. But the people, for all their supposed frustration, are largely indifferent to Washington. And that is the biggest problem.