United States | The contentious Congress preparing for the elections is one of the most hated institutions in the USA: “We like it less than cockroaches”

Stateside the legislative congress elections will be held in November, where all 435 members of the House of Representatives and 35 of the hundred members of the Senate will be re-elected.

Billions are burning, there is plenty of passion and the election is prominently featured in the US media. But a large part of the people could not be less interested in them, especially because the president is not chosen during the elections.

These are “by-elections” repeated every four years, in which only 50.1 percent of eligible voters participated in 2018. The reading may seem low, but it was a record high – the highest since the start of the First World War in 1914.

In the mid-term elections of 2014, the post-World War II record for inactivity was set, when only a good 36 percent of voters bothered to go to the ballot box.

Director of the Foreign Policy Institute, or Upi Mika Aaltola says that especially the lower house of Congress, i.e. the House of Representatives, is very unpopular.

“Perhaps the people’s hopes, pressures, disappointments and discord are most reflected in it. Now what was it that people like it less than cockroaches?” Aaltola recalls.

Wave refers in 2013 to the slightly tongue in cheek Public Policy Polling institute to the survey, where 44 percent of respondents said they liked cockroaches more than Congress. Congress was valued more by 42 percent, i.e. compared to cockroaches. Witches, toenail fungus, dog poop, and hemorrhoids also won Congress in their popularity.

In more serious polls, Congress has been American for fifteen straight years least valued institutionwhen the people have been asked to tell about the trust they feel towards different parties.

Upin Visiting senior researcher Anna Kronlund further notes that in the published August In a Gallup poll only 22 percent of Americans gave their support for the job done by Congress.

“The United States is a presidential-led system, where certain successes are personified by the president. When Congress is a bicameral system and you often have to do such back-and-forth, it may not appear to the citizens as an efficient organization,” says Kronlund.

According to Kronlund, the party in the majority position – currently the Democrats – easily gets the label that the party does not get enough time compared to the expectations created in the elections. And what the minority party is doing looks like braking.

Thus, the cock of honor does not crow to anyone.

of the Gallup company in a recent article it is said that hating Congress has a long tradition in the United States. Writer-humorist Mark Twain (1835–1910), for example, once stated that “in my mind [Jeesuksen pettänyt] Judas Iscariot was nothing but a vile, mean and deficient Congressman”.

“Congress has been the most visible representative body and therefore has often become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the American government,” the author of the Gallup article, a professor at Princeton University Keith E. Whittington explained.

It is impossible to separate the current unpopularity of Congress from the political divide tearing the United States apart. It has accelerated as a phenomenon at a steady pace since the early 1990s and has since become particularly blatantly visible with social media.

Political observers remember how, even in the 1980s, the representatives of the main parties could bark at each other in front of the TV cameras, but after that, they went to a beer in perfect harmony. Nowadays, the relationships between many MPs are poisoned by hatred.

of the Pew Research Institute according to the analysis five decades ago, there were 144 Republicans in the House of Representatives who were ideologically less conservative than the most conservative Democrats.

Today, there is no longer any similar “ideological overlap” in Congress, a Pew analysis measuring voting behavior concluded last March. Haven’t been in two decades.

According to calculations by the Pew Institute, in the early 1970s there were about 160 representatives in Congress who could be characterized as “moderate”. Now there are only about 20 of them.

According to researcher Kronlund, an important watershed moment in polarization was the 1994 congressional elections, the “Republican revolution”, where the party won the majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1954.

A populist and sharp-tongued person became the Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich. Under his leadership, the Republicans mercilessly attacked the “corrupt” Democratic president Bill Clinton’s attacked, also in the form of criminal charges stemming from the sex scandal.

In the best political tradition, it turned out that Gingrich, who slandered Clinton, was simultaneously having an extramarital affair with a woman more than 20 years his junior.

According to Kronlund, the US two-party system and the related intra-party primaries are structures that favor the success of top candidates. This is because the “hard core” voters, who are most passionate about politics, vote in the primaries.

Mika Aaltola adds that the frequent elections in the House of Representatives, which are repeated every two years, “make politics chaotic” and force congressmen to seek visibility with shocking and often statements related to “identity wars”.

“Traditional questions, such as the budget, no longer matter as much compared to questions of identity. Nobody is interested in a pragmatic politician anymore, when there are much more flamboyant and fireworks-like politicians available,” says Aaltola.

The fact that senators are elected for six-year terms brings balance to Congress. The long term gives senators peace of mind to build a more statesmanlike role in legislative work and other decisions. From a senatorial background, Joe Biden made an effort to become vice president and then president.

If coming closer to the present day, the atmosphere of the Congress is impossible to detach from the presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s for years. During the eight-year reign of Democrat Obama from 2009 to 2017, Republicans focused so vigorously on pushing the president’s agenda that the bickering in Congress threatened even the realization of democracy, the two who have studied Congress for a long time Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein has stated.

According to Mann and Ornstein, the main culprits for the state of paralysis in Congress were Republicans, as they stated in their 2016 book It’s Even Worse Than It Was (It’s even worse than it was). The name of the book was borrowed from the previous congress book published by the duo in 2006 The Broken Branch (Broken state power).

While in the early 1970s members of Congress voted entirely within their own ranks in about 60 percent of cases, in the last decade the number had risen close to 90 percent. Since the support of 60 out of 100 senators is usually needed in the Senate and the party ratios are about 50-50, many legislative projects and decisions are paralyzed.

During Trump’s term, the pace of division accelerated to the extreme, when the Democrats even brought criminal charges against Trump twice. Both times, Senate Republicans saved Trump from the precipice. In the opinion of the Trumpites, the Democrats in the congressional majority committed an unjustified witch hunt, while the Democrats saw Trump as a great threat to democracy.

The radicalization of Republicans caused by the Trump era will be closely watched in the November elections. If the candidates supported by Trump do well in the elections, the probability that Trump will run for president again in 2024 increases even more.

It has become almost an article of faith among Republicans that the 2020 presidential election was a big fraud in which Biden stole the presidency from Trump. The argument is potash, but kissing Trump’s ring is the lifeblood of success for many of the party’s politicians.

If Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, windy times are ahead in the United States. The Hill magazine told at the end of Augustthat the Republicans already have at least eight different projects pending to bring criminal charges against Biden.

The reasons for possible charges are varied: migration policy, withdrawal from Afghanistan, corona measures, Biden’s son Hunter. However, a unifying thought hovers over all the reasons: revenge lives on.

According to Anna Kronlund, what is particularly interesting in the elections is to observe how the Supreme Court’s decision last summer, which overturned the protection of the right to abortion, affects the voter turnout and the result Roe v. Wade – decision from 1973.

The abortion issue has improved the situation for the Democrats, who previously feared a crushing defeat and the loss of their majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Now the polling averages show that the Democrats even have a slight lead over the Republicans, at least based on national surveys.

The Finns’ minds have been relieved recently by the fact that the Congress is sometimes able to cooperate in the midst of all its disputes. This is what happened when the Senate ratified in August by a landslide Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO membership applications.

“Bridge building is in foreign policy and the global role of the United States, especially in relation to China, but also in relation to Russia. There is a surprising amount of monotony, when you think that in these times it would not really exist at all,” says Aaltola.

There is an example in recent history that the internal harmony of the Congress could increase the value of the institution in the eyes of the people as well. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, politicians and the people wrapped themselves in the Star-Spangled Banner and the popularity of the Congress temporarily shot up to 84 percent.

However, blowing on one coal soon went out of fashion.