In Praise of Congress -- Yes, Really

It strikes me as terribly unfair and more than a little ironic that only 21 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. At the risk of even fewer than 21 percent of readers approving of this column, I'm going to go out on a limb here and defend those crazy kids.

Lord knows it's easy to bash Congress, the 535-headed hydra monster of democracy. There are so many senators and representatives talking so much, and in such loud voices, that it's often hard to discern if anything's actually getting done. And you can count on at least a few people making headlines, the bad kind, at any given moment.

The current marquee names are Republican Sen. John Ensign of Nevada (extramarital affair with a campaign aide married to his Senate chief of staff; may have violated laws and Senate rules by giving her $96,000 and securing lobbying work for her husband) and Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel of New York (investigation ongoing into questionable fundraising practices, failure to report assets, failure to disclose and pay taxes, and why he has four rent-controlled luxury apartments in New York).

And then there is the contest for what Democratic strategist Tracy Sefl calls "loudmouth of the week." Winners so far include South Carolina Republican Joe "You Lie!" Wilson and Florida Democrat Alan "Die Quickly" Grayson. "The hyper-coverage of the outliers affects the perceptions of the whole body," Sefl says.

Still, 21 percent. That's a mere quarter of the all-time high of 84 percent, achieved in a rally-round moment after the 9/11 attacks, and barely better than the all-time low of 14 percent recorded by Gallup in July 2008.

The irony is that this plunge comes at a time when many in Congress are doing just what politicians should do and what President Obama has asked of them: Instead of veering from "shock to trance" in a reactive mode, as he once put it, they are trying to deal with large, complicated, long-term problems such as soaring health costs, millions of uninsured, oil dependence, climate change, new regulations for Wall Street and -- not least -- severe recession and job losses.

This is a case of no good deed going unpunished, particularly for Democrats who control both chambers and face a near constant wall of solid Republican opposition. The $787 billion stimulus package, along with bailouts of banks, General Motors and Chrysler, have been deeply unpopular. But most objective observers, including economists, say these steps taken by Obama and former president George W. Bush averted a collapse of the U.S. economy. Republicans who insist the stimulus plan is not working remind me of my son who, when he was small and sick, used to insist he didn't need medicine. We'd make him take it, he'd start feeling better, and then he'd say, "See? I told you I didn't need it."

The stimulus package is an accomplishment on multiple fronts, and not just for injecting money and confidence into state governments and other parts of the economy. The $90 billion it directs toward clean energy makes it "the biggest energy bill that's ever passed," says Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy at the liberal Center for American Progress.

Bills to promote electronic medical records have been pending for six years with bipartisan support, says congressional scholar Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. With the stimulus, he says, "they were finally enacted, with a healthy sum of money," $20 billion. There are innovative education programs and important medical research in the stimulus package. There's a fix for the alternative minimum tax, making sure it doesn't hit people below certain income levels.

Beyond the stimulus bill, Congress has opened the Children's Health Insurance Program to millions more children. It has dramatically expanded public and community service programs. It has passed the Lilly Ledbetter Act, bringing the rules on pay discrimination lawsuits into line with the reality of the workplace. Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution, calls the objective record -- including oversight of the war in Afghanistan -- "impressive by historical standards."

Of course, what's been in the news for months is endless arguments -- some of them shrill -- over health care. But it's hard to overstate how seriously many on Capitol Hill take health reform and how hard they have been working on it. And this goes for members of both parties, even Republicans all but sure to vote against the bill in the end.

A few statistics: The Senate Finance Committee has not spent more than two days "marking up," or amending, a bill in 10 years, according to chairman Max Baucus, but it spent seven days on health reform (more than 80 hours all told). A bipartisan group of six committee members met 61 times over three months. (Clarification: Baucus said Tuesday that the group met 31 times, for more than 61 hours). Republican ideas were incorporated into the bill before markup and another 11 GOP amendments were accepted during the markup. The Senate HELP Committee adopted 160 Republican amendments, many of them substantive.

On the House side, the Energy and Commerce Committee worked for 34 hours on its health bill, adopting 82 Democratic amendments and 18 Republican ones. That committee also did heavy lifting on the sweeping energy and climate bill passed by the House -- 37 hours of markup and 32 amendments approved in public session, including four from the GOP.

The gulf between perception and what I've observed this year in reporting on Congress hit me hard the other day when I saw that Democratic Sens. Tom Carper of Delaware and Charles Schumer of New York were floating a new version of the public option -- a government-run health insurance plan, funded by premiums, that Obama and many Democrats say is the best way to drive down costs and keep private insurance companies honest.

There were already several compromise ideas on the table, such as consumer-owned co-ops, voluntary state-level public plans and state plans that would kick in if insurance companies didn't meet certain conditions. But Carper and Schumer came up with a creative new approach with potentially broader appeal: A federal public plan that states could decline to offer if they so chose or, in a reverse permutation, that they could join if they so chose. Some variation of this could resolve one of the stickiest issues in the reform process.

People who aren't paid to pay close attention to Capitol Hill aren't going to notice this little stroke of (possibly transformative) legislative prowess. Bad behavior, partisan conflict, slow progress and massive complexity (the kind that leads to fear of change) are far more visible. Add to that a dark pall over everything Washington-related these days because the economy is so bad. Americans "see 9.8 percent unemployment and continued sluggishness. That trumps everything else," Ornstein says.

It's a no-win environment for Congress. It tries to fix things by spending money (such as on the stimulus) and that seems to bother a lot of people. It proposes ways to save money -- by researching medical treatments and spreading information on which work best, for instance -- and that also seems to upset people.

The best chance for a short-term congressional rebound is health reform. Yes, it's hard and yes, people are saying they don't like it. But as the nonpartisan Pew Research Center said in summarizing its latest poll, "Support for Health Care Reform Slips . . . Despite Steady Support for Specific Elements."

There's only one way to beat that: Just pass the darn bill and pray that Obama -- Nobel superstar -- isn't the only one who gets the credit when people finally realize they like it.