Congress

We've all heard about President Bush's low approval rating, right? Has anybody heard what Congress's approval rating is? Well, I conducted a non-scientific poll today and found out that 100% of Americans have never heard an approval rating for Congress. (The poll has a margin error of +/- 100%, with 1 respondent.) Anyway, Gallup has new data shows what percentage of Americans have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress. And that percentage is ... 14%. There were 16 institutions on Gallup's "Confidence in Institutions" survey. Here are this year's results:

The Military - 69%
Small Business - 59%
The Police - 54%
Church/Organized Religion - 46%
Banks - 41%
The U.S. Supreme Court - 34%
Public Schools - 33%
The Medical System - 31%
The Presidency - 25%
Television News - 23%
Newspapers - 22%
Criminal Justice System - 19%
Organized Labor - 19%
Big Business - 18%
HMOs - 15%
Congress - 14%

One reason why Americans do not have confidence in Congress - deception. CNN's Anderson Cooper tried to find out what kind of earmarks members of the U.S. House of Representatives had asked for:

We had CNN interns for three days call literally every member of the House, 435 of them, to ask them to give us a list of what requests they had made for, you know, appropriations in their district. Only 31 of them were willing to provide the information. Sixty eight of them declined. Three hundred twenty-nine of them didn't even return our calls or provide the request at all.

How quickly these people forget that their job is to represent their constituents. You cannot do that when you refuse to answer to them.