Nothing's changed but the names

According to recent polls, the support of Congress by the American people has never been so low. Less than 10 percent of all Americans thought Congress was doing a good job and that low approval rating doesn't surprise anybody. It has been called a Congress of obstruction and a 'do-nothing' Congress and those are some of the nice characterizations. The Republican use of 60 votes in the Senate to get anything passed or anyone approved has brought the effectiveness of this branch to a screeching halt. And even though the number of people filing for unemployment is the lowest it's been since January of 2008, the automobile industry is recording the best sales they've had since 2006 and the Dow Jones Industrial Averages closed at a new record high again yesterday, the Republicans continue to disparage the President at every turn.

Many people think this is a relatively new phenomena but it isn't. The people in power just changed hats. President Eisenhower, a Republican, issued stern warnings about the newly developing military-industrial complex and the need for it to be constantly monitored and controlled back in the late 1950s. Today's Republicans have never seen a military budget they didn't like. Many of the supporters of racial integration were northern and Midwestern moderate and liberal Republicans, opponents were southern Democrats. Today, liberal Republicans have become extinct and moderate Republicans are defeated regularly in elections by conservative Republicans. Democrats want more aid to go to those at the bottom of our society, Republicans want less, or better yet, none at all.

Robert Caro, the author of the exhaustive trilogy of books about Lyndon Johnson and his role as leader of the Senate, writes the following:

"Public contempt for Congress was growing steadily. Journalists discussed the institution in clichés. Richard Stout wrote that 'the inefficiency in Congress is a national scandal.' Academics placed its inefficiency in broader context. Yale Professor Wallace Hamilton said that because of congressional ineptitude, 'the life of representative government is at stake.' Commentators made jokes about it. 'The senate's rules provide that the Senate may not perform its duties' Russell Baker was to say. There was, in a way, a national consensus on the issue. 'For generations, Fortune magazine was to say, 'Americans swore that there was no better government in the world or in history ... Is it the truth? It no longer is. ...the legislative machinery, which is the heart of democracy, is breaking down.' Even many congressmen agreed. As one said, 'The people think we are a bunch of clowns.' The Senate, by its use of the colorful filibuster was viewed, with anger, as the principal obstruction to American's majority will. As Russell Baker was to write, 'For years the house diligently passed comprehensive civil rights legislation and the Southern minority in the Senate just as regularly killed it.' The Senate had been an object of ridicule for almost a century ... Alben Barkley said, 'I've never seen such chaos.' President Truman ran against the 'Do Nothing Eightieth Congress, saying it was 'run by a bunch of old mossbacks still living back in the 1890s.'"

This quote by Caro was about the Congress of the 1940s, some 70 years ago, and much of it could be lifted out of his book and applied directly to the Congress of today. Congressmen have a Cadillac health insurance plan and Mercedes retirement benefits but they want us to have neither. They constantly want more while doing everything they can to insure that the rest of us have less. And yet we still call our system of government a representative democracy.

So what does it tell us? It speaks to a simple truth, one we have heard over and over since we were children.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.