Saturday, March 10, 2012

Approval of the Congress

According to a recent Gallup Poll, American's approval has hit the lowest its ever been at a surprising low 10%.

This could be do to fact that each representative in Congress now represents a much larger population then it did in 1929 when the number House of Representatives were capped at 435. Thus each member of the house now represents hundreds of thousands of more people. Also senators are also representing much greater numbers, population wise. Therefor the people feel they are being represented less then before. Could this be the reason? Why do you think Congress's approval is so low?

5 comments:

Kore Chan said...

Given that representatives usually act as politicos, I believe that the public's disapproval of Congress usually stems from the fact that they do not agree with the trustee actions of their representative. Furthermore, with the increase in filibusters / holds and other things that slow down Congress, many people probably believe that Congress spends too much time arguing among themselves instead of passing laws that would help them.

Katherine La Serna said...

It’s clear that nowadays nobody likes what congress is doing or the direction its taking. I agree with Kore that congress spends far too much time arguing about a bill than passing them. Some blame the GOP who keeps blocking mostly everything. There shouldn’t be a fight every time, they could start compromising and getting things done. When we have a congress with a heightened sensitivity to scrutiny, it is harder to make process. This just shows how fragmented congress is.

Taylor Scherer said...

I do think that part of the reason is because Congressmen in the house are representing more people, so there is a greater chance that a good amount of a district could disagree with its representative's actions. Also, as previous comments stated, Congress is slow in getting things done and this results in unhappy American people. They may feel as if problems in our country are not actually getting fixed since the process to make a bill into law is very time-consuming. People want to see positive changes happening as soon as possible, but things like partisan differences definitely get in the way.

itsALEXZ said...

People will not be satisfied until the economy has returned to a more acceptable condition. The fact that congress has been slow to act on several occasions is extremely frustrating for many citizens as well.

If congress were to make important decisions made to help the people of the United States, instead of bickering amongst themselves, then the approval rating could feasibly be higher than it is now.

Jennifer Nguyen said...

I agree with Kore and Katherine. I feel like the main reason Congress has such a low approval rate is mainly because they are spending too much time filibustering and arguing. I believe if Congress spent more time trying to find compromises as opposed to trying to getting everything their party/interest groups want, then maybe Congress would have a higher approval rate. I also have to think that since it takes Congress a very long time to actually create laws, this could also cause the low approval rating. Not many citizens truly know the process Congress must go through to create laws, and as a result citizens have unrealistic expectations for our government.