2011 Congressional Approval Rating: 11%

   Happy Holidays everyone,


The U.S. Senate has gone home for the year, and the House looks to have as well, but not without first setting a couple of records :

• Congress currently has an approval rating of only 11%, the lowest ever recorded since Gallup started polling in 1974, with a yearly average of only 17% in 2011 (also a new low). That's lower than, for example, communism, or King George III during the American Revolution. [1]

• This past session was the most "do-nothing" Congress since 1995, when control of each chamber was similarly split between Democrats & Republicans, enacting the fewest number of bills (66). [2]

But our historically-disliked, gridlocked Congress still introduced thousands of bills over the past year. So what did they do?

• Last week, a book review in The New York Times praised Prof. Lawrence Lessig's research on systemic corruption: "In the first quarter of 2011 Congress — awash in special interest money from banks attempting to push through a bill allowing them to collect per-transaction debit-card fees — spent more time on that issue than on unemployment, the deficit, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, health care or global warming." [3]

• Two fast-tracked bills on top of the agenda when Congress returns, SOPA (H.R. 3261) and PIPA (S. 968), would establish the first-ever China-style internet censorship in America. Corporations & special interest groups supporting these bills have donated more than four times as much money to relevant committee members as opponents. Together, SOPA & PIPA are the least-popular bills in the OC community over the past year, with only 1% user support (38 votes aye, 2,890 votes nay). [4, 5]

• This past week, as you likely heard in the news, House Republicans rejected a bipartisan agreement from the Senate to extend payroll tax cuts. The outcome of this failure to compromise will include higher taxes for 160 million Americans, reduced Medicare payments, and an end in January to benefits for 6 million long-term unemployed people. [6]

Well, even though Congress in its current form is massively unpopular, OpenCongress.org remains a highly popular public resource. Our 2011 year-in-review ::

• More than 4 million site visits, 10 million pageviews, and tens of millions of automated data requests every week to our unique database of official government info and social wisdom from around the Web.

• Over 50,000 emails sent from the public to their members of Congress in the past six months. OC is the only free & open-source & not-for-profit web tool for emailing all your members of Congress, then tracking any response in a transparent public forum, with fully open data for the public benefit.

• Over 300 posts written on our OC Blog, explaining what's really happening in Congress in real-world language, with links to the work of our open-gov allies, helpful news & blog coverage, and highlighted comments from over 200,000 "MyOC" members.

Next year we'll release even more free tools for the public to organize their communities and whip Congress around bills and issues. But we're a tiny non-profit project, and we need your help just to keep OpenCongress up and running. Please make a year-end donation to support our work:


http://www.opencongress.org/donate


... donations are tax-exempt, and go directly towards our (considerable) server costs and (free, libre & open-source) site maintenance. OC is used every day by tens of thousands of political bloggers, citizen watchdogs, and first-time visitors in need of a user-friendly interface for Congress. More info on what we've accomplished with our limited resources can be found on our year-in-review blog post. [7]


Please consider for a moment how terribly dysfunctional the U.S. Congress is. And then how important it is that OpenCongress continues to build transparency and accountability in it. We really need your help to keep going.


Thank you,
- David and the OC Team


http://www.opencongress.org/donate

[1] -  http://www.gallup.com/poll/151628/Congress-Ends-2011-Record-Low-Approval.aspx


[2] - http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/12/do-nothing-congress-really-did-nothing-year/45774/
[3] -http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/books/republic-lost-campaign-finance-reform-book-review.html?_r=1&pagewanted=al 
[4] -http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/2455-Net-Censorship-Bills-On-Top-of-the-Agenda-for-After-the-Holidays 
[5] - http://www.opencongress.org/bill/hot?order=desc&page=1&sort=support_count_1&timeframe=1year
[6] - http://www.npr.org/2011/12/21/144087072/hill-standoff-over-payroll-tax-cut-continues
[7]- http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/2454-Worst-Congress-Ever-Support-OpenCongress-with-a-Year-End-Donation-