While Donald Trump was running for President, he dominated the 24/7 news cycle by generating conflict and controversy on a daily basis, and since Donald Trump’s election, the world has been abuzz over the conflict and controversy he continues to create— on a daily basis.
But while everybody is focused on Trump’s war with the left, war with the media, war with Muslim nations and anything else he’s stirred up this week, we may be missing the fact that something truly remarkable has happened in a very short time.
In a release issued Tuesday, Rasmussen Reports indicated that an independent survey of 1,000 likely voters demonstrates that “voters show more faith in Congress today than they ever did during the Obama administration.”
According to the release, 25 percent of likely U.S. voters think Congress is doing a good or excellent job. While a .250 batting average isn’t anything to brag about at any level, it is significantly better than the 11 percent of voters who responded favorably to the same question as recently as last July, and Rasmussen Reports announced that it is the most confidence voters have shown in Congress since 2007.
So while half the country is screaming for somebody to rein in President Trump, and the other half is hollering for somebody to get ahold of the media (and everybody is yelling at each other, just look at the Letters to the Editor below) for the first time in a decade Congress may be doing something besides hurling insults at each other.
That may not necessarily be true, but so much attention is being paid to this president’s running gun battles with a wide assortment of entities that very little attention is being paid to Congress because Trump really hasn’t targeted Congress.
Although it is probably unintentional, the current level of disinterest in Congress’ squabbles may be the greatest accomplishment of the first month of the Trump administration.
It would appear that Republicans and Democrats in Congress alike are struggling to keep up with the media frenzy surrounding everything the president does and says, and as such very few of them seem to be getting too dug in on positions put forward by the new Commander in Chief.
Sure, Democrats in Congress have sounded the alarm about a few cabinet appointments and executive orders, and their Republican counterparts have responded, but with the news cycle jumping to a new topic every time Trump tweets, the legislative branch has largely been able to retreat from the spotlight and that has the public believing that Congress is functioning at a higher level. That may or may not to be true, but we’re hopeful that it is because the imbalance in our system of checks and balances had to be corrected. It is hard to argue that the executive and judicial branches of government have expanded their power in recent decades, and it is almost certain that Congress has lost power as a result of its own dysfunction. A restoration of Constitutional balance can only be a good thing.