...but I'm going to take it too seriously, as usual. The thing is that they [i]don't[/i] have a 9% approval rating (and not just because it's at 12% now lol). It's an interesting, but ultimately meaningless, statistic. 9% approval is what the entire country thinks of Congress-- but does the entire country vote for each Congressman? The individual approval ratings of the Senators and Representatives are way higher than 9%, which basically means that every district and state thinks "well, [i]my[/i] guy is good, but it's the rest of Congress that sucks!". If a Senator had a 9% approval rating, there's a good chance that he would be fired, just like you. I do think that Congress is kind of sucking at its job, but the discrepancy between the approval rating of Congress and the [url=http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php]reelection rates of Congressional members[/url] makes one thing clear: people are dumd.