Americans are fed up with what is now literally a do-nothing Congress. Sixty-seven percent of respondents in a new poll taken before the latest maneuvers by House Republicans said that the chamber needs to elect a speaker “as soon as possible.”
And that’s with the shady prompt in one question of the poll by Suffolk University for USA Today: “I don’t care if Congress elects a speaker. Every day that goes by without a speaker means that Congress can’t waste more of our tax dollars.” Not only is that misleading, since government waste continues and, in theory, could be even worse without congressional oversight, but it’s also a prompt that is basically trolling for conservatives.
Even with that crummy wording, the poll could still scrape up only 25 percent of the electorate that wanted a speakerless House.
Yet, in the same poll, 61 percent of respondents expressed very little or no confidence “in the nation’s leaders to handle the major challenges the nation faces.”
Chris Stirewalt is a contributing writer for The Dispatch, the politics editor for The Hill and NewsNation, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, co-host of the Ink Stained Wretches podcast, and author of Broken News, a book on media and politics.
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