With our hopes for congressional reform dashed by the hypocrisy of the new Democratic congressional leadership, which is imitating all the abuses of the Republicans while they were in power, approval ratings for the House and Senate have dropped to 23 percent in the most recent NBC/Wall St Journal survey.
Congress now gets even lower approval ratings than President Bush, even though he languishes at 29 percent in the same survey.
When the Democrats took over Congress, hopes rose briefly and the NBC/Wall St. Journal survey recorded a favorable rating of 43 percent for Congress. But those days of cautious optimism are now long gone and, in their wake, is just bitter disappointment.
In our new book "Outrage: How Illegal Immigration, the United Nations, Congressional Ripoffs, Student Loan Overcharges, Tobacco Companies, Trade Protection, and Drug Companies Are Ripping Us Off ... And Whatv to Do About It, we try to spell out some of the reasons for this mounting public anger against Congress. [Editor's Note: To get your copy of "Outrage" FREE, Go Here Now.]
The fact that it jumped to No. 1 in non-fiction on Amazon.com on its first day of release shows how furious Americans really are.
Here's why they should be:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has three sons and a son-in-law who have chosen lobbying as their profession. It isn't that hard to lobby Dad.
The wife and son of Minority Whip Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo, both lobbied for Altra, the new sanitized name for Philip Morris, and the Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, passed out checks from tobacco PACs on the House floor.
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Thirty members of the House and Senate employ their wives or children on their campaign payrolls, converting special interest campaign donations into personal payments to their family bank account.
Twenty of the 100 senators have family members whose job it is to lobby them.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now wants no child to be left behind. She wants adult children to be able to accompany members of Congress on taxpayer funded Defense Department trips when their spouses can't make it.
After Pelosi promised to make Congress work hard, she has set up a schedule where they will have twenty weeks off in 2007 (and most work weeks are Tuesday to Thursday).
But all members of Congress are doing is personifying the greed and corruption we document in "Outrage":
The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wanted the board to approve a resolution banning board members from criticizing him or his staff!
There are only 2,000 federal agents charged with finding illegal immigrants — all 12.5 million of them — who already live here and major cities like New York and Los Angeles do not permit their local police to help.
Reading scores in schools have gone up by only one-half of one percent since 1990 even though taxpayers are shelling out 29 percent more money per pupil adjusted for inflation. Why? Largely because of work rules put into teacher unions.
Insurance companies Nationwide (we're on your side), Allstate (you're in good hands), and State Farm (like a good neighbor) are stiffing the victims of Katrina saying that they will only cover wind damage not water damage. Ever seen a dry hurricane?
And so forth and so on. Who can blame us for being outraged!!
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