… Congress has suffered from a general public distrust of the major institutions of American society. But Congress, like the presidency, suffers a particular partisan dynamic. Voters may love their congressmen and hate Congress, but they hate Congress a little more when the other party is in control of it. As partisanship has intensified in recent years, it is hard for Congress as an institution to escape our growing tendency to trust only our side of the partisan divide.
There is also intriguing evidence that Americans just do not like to watch the political sausage getting made. It is the nature of representative assemblies that they publicly display all political disagreements and conflicts. Americans would like to think that politics would be simple and agreeable, if we could just “get under the hood,” as Ross Perot promised in the 1990s, or “drain the swamp,” as Donald Trump promised in 2016. CONT.
Keith E. Whittington (Princeton), Gallup