Why is Bush Twice as Popular as Congress?

Why is the Democratic Congress so terribly unpopular with voters? Congressional approval ratings are at a historical low of 18%. I don’t believe that it is because the Democratic Congress is working to improve wages, protecting workers’ right to unionize, improving children’s access to health care, fostering alternative energy and energy independence, enacting the 9/11 Commission recommendations, passing meaningful ethics and lobbying reforms, restoring pay-as-you-go fiscal discipline, and reinvesting in our future by doubling our commitment to basic research and math and science education. No, I think most people strongly approve of those, and other, Democratic priorities.

What is killing Congress’ approval rating is their failure to confront this Administration forcefully enough about the occupation of Iraq, and it’s abuses of executive power and civil liberties. These are issues that swamp every other good thing that the Democratic Congress has done and can do for this country. These are the issues on which nearly enough, is not nearly enough. Americans want this occupation ended and they want it yesterday, and they want this executive back within constitutional bounds. Until the Congress is willing to invest all its political capital in these goals, their numbers won’t budge out of the basement.

Many Democrats in leadership positions think we are sitting pretty. The occupation of Iraq was on the Republican’s watch and therefore the electorate will rightly hold them accountable for any failures going forward. And trying to take on the the Administration when it has wrapped itself in the flag on matters of anti-terrorism civil liberties violations will only get Democrats burned.

Unfortunately, That’s not how it works. Our leaders hope that by just sitting on our collective hands and letting Bush have all the rope he asks for, that we will win by default because voters haven’t anywhere else to go. They want to ride dissatisfaction with Bush and with the GOP in general into total power in 2008, taking over the Presidency and improving our majority in Congress.

That seems a sound, prudent and low-risk policy. But it is also a foolish one, as the Congressional approval rating bears out. The American people expect more of their leadership than not making egregious mistakes, they want real leadership, convictions and guts. Just not being the Republicans isn’t enough to produce a mandate from the voters in 2008.

When we have a Vice President who is practically taunting Congress with his contempt for their subpoena power, it is no wonder that the public also holds Congress in contempt. Pelosi took impeachment off the table in attempt to create a functional divided Federal Government that could do the work of the people. But this Administration has no intention of allowing that to happen. It’s like trying to appease terrorists, it doesn’t work and it looks every bit as weak.

The Congress is only reluctantly and incrementally bringing to bear it’s full Constitutional authority to rein in this Administration and people are feed up with its timorous approach. That is why approval is so low. Not because they are being too partisan and too harsh with the Administration, but because they are insufficiently partisan and not nearly harsh enough.

Impeachment, the power of the purse, subpoena power, and advise and consent powers should be fully and vigorously used to check, and if need be, destroy this over-reaching, illegal, and downright criminal Administration. Until the Democratic leaders of Congress realize that their primary goal for the next year is to reassert the primacy of Congressional power against an out-of-control Executive, their electoral hopes for 2008, along with those of Democratic candidates everywhere, will continue to fade.