CONGRESS AND THE POLLS. For all the talk of Congress's low approval ratings, congressional Democrats are doing a whole lot better than congressional Republicans. According to a new Washington Post poll, Reid and Pelosi's forces attract a 46 percent approval rating, while the Republicans are down at 36 percent. This may actually be the relevant measure: Too often, when we talk about the favorability of Congress as an institution, we forget that such numbers measure opinions of both the minority and majority parties -- not just the majority party. It's interesting, too, that opinions of the two congressional delegations have been pretty static over the past decade or so. Save for a few months in 1994, Democrats have posted favorability numbers between 41% and 51% with startling consistency. And Republicans have remained between 34% and 48%. That data is a little patchy, misseing key years like 2002, what with its post-9/11 bump, but it's interesting to see that there's really been no macro trend effecting either group. --Ezra Klein
