A House Divided

A scene from the film "1776" shows John Adams -- so fed up with congress' bickering --he's about to blow his wig.

"I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace. That two are called a law firm and that three or more become a congress," Adams declared.

But long before Hollywood took its shot, Congress was the location of many a turbulent scene reports CBS News Correspondent Joie Chen.

Say, back in 1856: congressman Preston Brooks -- a slavery advocate -- beat abolitionist senator Charles Sumner senseless -- right on the Senate floor.

It was Mark Twain who once declared: "there is no distinctly American criminal class ... except Congress."

Years later, Will Rogers took up where Twain left off, joking that when one senator called another "a jackass" the animal had the right to sue for slander.

"It is almost built into our political DNA to hate Congress. it goes back to the beginning of the republic and it's continued," says Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar with the American Enterprise Institute.

"It's built on the distrust of government: the sense that people in power have to be held in check and can't be entirely trusted," Ornstein says.

And today, Ornstein says many Americans are increasingly turned off by members of Congress acting like kids in a sandbox.

Here's Indiana Republican John Hostetler recently -- carping about the other side:

"But like a moth to a flame, Democrats can't help themselves when it comes to denigrating and demonizing Christians," Hostetler declared.

Democrat David Obey took exception. "Mr. Speaker, the words I object to are that Democrats are making war on Christians," Obey responded.

Of course, neither party is immune to taking potshots. Not long ago, Democratic senator Richard Durbin of Illinois had to apologize after comparing the Guantanamo prison camp with Nazi death camps and communist gulags.

"I've come to understand that was a very poor choice of words," Durbin said.

No wonder a recent CBS News poll finds only a third of those surveyed think Congress is doing a good job.

"The sense that the American people have is that they've got real concerns: health insurance, gas prices, pensions. Congress is not addressing those issues," Ornstein says.

Republican Olympia Snowe is serving her second term as senator from Maine. When she first came to Washington to serve in the House -- she says compromise was always on the agenda.

"You know if you have a problem, let's solve it," Snowe says. "Sit down, talk about it. Recognizing that Republicans and Democrats would have their political differences, but at the end of the day the desire was to come up with a solution to the problem."

That was then. This is now.

"There is a listening deficiency in Washington. People don't listen to one another," Snowe says. People view compromise, you know, as the wrong approach. It's either my way or no way."

Remember this year's State of the Union address?

When President Bush proposed private investment accounts for social security all the Republicans -- they're on the left -- stood up and applauded. The Democrats are all sitting down--stone faced.

How did it get this way?

Many observers point to 1987 as the tipping point: when judge Robert Bork's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court failed. Republicans blamed liberal special interest groups for killing the nomination and vowed not to forget. Fast-forward to 1994: scandal sent Democratic majority leader Dan Rostenkowski to jail.

Come Election Day, the Republicans won control of the House for the first time in nearly 50 years. Newt Gingrich led a "Republican revolution." The battle lines were drawn.

All of this against a backdrop of increasingly partisan attack ads -- growing nastier by the decade. Their not so subtle message to politicians: vote our way or pay the price! The result is that many lawmakers feel trapped in an endless campaign.

"People are much more concentrated on, you know, the next election," Snowe says. "The 30-second sound bite: there was a time, at least, that you could divorce the campaign from government. There was a period of time, a respite so to speak from the election where everybody understood that now it's time to get something done in the legislative process."

And now?

"No, it's nothing," Snowe says. "It's all one. It's seamless now from one election to the next and it's perpetual."

And something else happened: redistricting. In state capitols all around the country, lawmakers created more and more politically "pure" districts. As a result, in the last election nearly 80 percent of all House seats were won by margins of 60 percent or more.

With a firmer 'lock' on their safe seats, Republicans and Democrats have little incentive to compromise.

Pennsylvania Republican Jim Gerlach is one of the rare exceptions. In the evenly-divided sixth district outside Philadelphia, he's won twice, but only by two percentage points.

That razor-thin margin means he can't march lock-step with his party. So while he favors crackdowns on illegal immigration, he's against the Bush proposals of private investment accounts for social security.

A number of the major initiatives that have passed the house so far this session have been with 40,50,60,70 votes from the House Democrats. That includes bills tightening guidelines for bankruptcy and class action suits and legislation increasing the availability of embryonic stem cells for research.

We think of Washington as being this polarized place. We think everybody outside the beltway might be that way, too. But when you get out--when you go to the district, is it just as polarized?

"No, I don't think it is," Gerlach says. "I think there's much more commonality and views and perspectives of people in my district than, say, than what's found on the House floor."

His constituents agree.

"Generally, I believe we are getting too partisan and divided," one voter says.

"There's so many issues that are important out there right now and it seems like everything is a stalemate," says a second voter.

Now, the plot thickens. Confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee John Roberts begin late next month, setting the stage for what could be another partisan battle.

Colleagues call him brilliant and praise his integrity and fair-mindedness.

A million-dollar television campaign is already being waged by supporters of the nomination.

Patrick Leahy of Vermont is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I want to say a plague on a lot of the single issue groups on the left and right because they make it more difficult to bring about any kind of compromise," Leahy says.

"I hope we're under the gun on the judicial, especially the Supreme Court because if we realize we are, then I think we should all step back for a moment and say, how do we represent 280 million Americans, not groups of either left or right, who will be looking at just one or two issues."

After 30 years in the Senate, Leahy says he finds the mood in Congress so hostile that last year he nearly decided not to run for re-election. "If you're only going to be a mouth piece for special interest groups, then you're not doing it. You're not doing what the Senate is supposed to be," Leahy says.

In time Leahy thinks Congress will again be a more bipartisan place, but Ornstein is less sanguine.

"I must confess that for 30 years in this town, trekking up to Capitol Hill on a regular basis, there wasn't a single time when I would catch site of the Capitol dome when I wouldn't have a little skip in the heart," Ornstein says. "I still love the place and believe it's the center of the democracy that I believe in. But now when I go up to Capitol Hill, I get more a churning in the gut than I do a skip in my heart."