And the Republicans did threaten to eliminate the filibuster at least in certain circumstances. I suppose you could spin that hard enough to mean that they weren’t “against” it.

I hear criticisms like this a lot, but I think they’re mostly vacuous. For starters, the congressional approval rating is based a lot on what the congress has or has not successfully gotten done. A lot of the stuff that the congress hasn’t gotten done was because the GOP has been filibustering the shit out of everything (something that was horrible, awful, evil obstructionism when the Democrats were doing but is now somehow okay), and because the “blue dog” wing of the party still has too much influence given the razor-thin margins in Congress.

This isn’t to say that the Democrats in congress walk on water or haven’t done stupid things — of course they don’t, and of course they have! It’s just that the approval rating of congress, in and of itself, doesn’t tell us a damn thing about public opinion on Democratic and Republican policies. Do people “disapprove” because they don’t like the policies the Democrats are pursuing? Or do they “disapprove” because the Democrats aren’t moving away from GOP positions quickly enough? (My bet: Both, in roughly equal measure, depending on who’s answering the question. Partisan Republicans and partisan Democrats are likely to be very unhappy with what congress has done and/or failed to do, and for very different reasons.) So if we’re going to do a fair comparison here, we need to figure out why people don’t approve of congress, something these polls never seem to do, because that would be, you know, hard, or something.

But the more fundamental problem is that such polling treats congress like a whole, single entity, as opposed to the giant cluster f–k that it actually is. Ask the same people who “disapprove” of congress how they feel about their congresscritter, and I bet the approval rating for that moves into the positives, even if modestly. Oh, my congresscritter is okay, but congress as a whole blows.

I’m thinking Biden burger on the grill. Probably smells like polecat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TBNeNHHXEY