Is Congress waking up?

[groovedaddy]

AMID the clamor of the presidential campaign, it’s sometimes easy to forget that all 435 House seats and 35 of the Senate’s seats are up for election this year, too. So how should Congress under its new Democratic leadership be judged?

The public has reached a decidedly negative conclusion, based on Congress’s inability to force a change in policy on the Iraq war and the pitched partisan battles that characterized much of the year in Washington.

But expectations for seismic change in policymaking after the 2006 midterm elections were almost certainly too high, given the deep ideological differences between the parties, the Democrats’ narrow majorities, the now-routine Senate filibusters and a Republican president determined to go his own way on Iraq, the budget and domestic policy.

Based on our research, the 110th Congress does deserve some praise. In 2007, the level of energy and activity on Capitol Hill picked up markedly. This is not surprising — when the Newt Gingrich Congress, its closest analogue, took over in 1995, the pace of legislative life sped up, too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/19/opinion/19mann.html?th&emc=th