Sen. John McCain says Congress may share the blame for a bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Sen. Larry Craig issues a press release blaming Congress for the decline of U.S. airlines. Rep. Roy Blunt blames Congress for denying Americans access to cheaper gasoline.

Congressional approval ratings are in the tank — down to a record 14 percent in a Gallup poll released last week. Maybe it’s partly because the people who fight so hard to get into Congress spend so much time trashing the place once they’re there.

“I worry about it,” former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) says of all the Congress-bashing he hears from members. “It seems to me the end result is to denigrate the Congress and weaken the constitutional system. And when you do that, you’re playing with dynamite over the long run.”

Hating on Congress isn’t exactly new. In the 1970s, political scientist Richard Fenno noted the phenomenon of running for Congress by running against Congress.

In the early 1990s, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich spearheaded the Republican Revolution with an anti-institution stratagem that took Fenno’s postulate to the extreme. Autophobia has coursed through congressional veins ever since.  

“I would think that the attitude of most Americans, growing up as we do, learning about our form of government and understanding Congress to be the heart of representative government, that there would be a fair amount of pride in serving here and some sense of how someone is part of an ongoing history, and that should put brakes on certain trashing of the institution,” says Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.).

The reality? “There is a lot of careless talk that veers over to a kind of dismissive attitude and denigration of the institution that often ties to self-righteousness,” he says.

Price complains that internecine warring, compounded by the modern media culture, has diminished the stature of institutionalists like himself. “I see it as a dying breed,” says former Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards, now a vice president at the Aspen Institute.

With the Democrats in control of both chambers, Congress-bashing of late has been the province of the Grand Old Party. But even some Republicans worry that it goes too far.

Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) recently gave a talk to a group of members in which he actually said some nice things about the body in which they serve. “I really believe that most members feel that way, although maybe they don’t always express it,” says LaHood. “And more of us who are institutionalists need to speak up for the institution.”

Of course, when a Republican leader such as Blunt, the GOP whip, says that Congress is standing in the way of offshore oil drilling, he mostly means “the Democrats who run Congress.” But that’s not how it comes out. Lawmakers speak in shorthand, and — as one House Republican aide put it — blaming “Congress” rather than, say, “Nancy Pelosi” seems less bellicose.

But if members blame Congress for America’s woes, doesn’t that make it hard for their constituents to make the distinction?

“I saw a recent poll that as many as 40 percent of people still believe that Congress is in Republican hands,” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) told the Christian Science Monitor recently. “I wish we could get a little accuracy out there about who is in charge — and let those ratings fall where they may.”

It is political hara-kiri, or so goes the conventional wisdom, to advocate too strongly for the purpose of the institution, and members fear that any quasi-intricate explanation of how Congress works will be taken as intolerable excuse-making.

“They get much bigger applause lines if they trash the Congress,” says Donald Wolfensberger, director of the Congress Project at the Wilson Center.

“We hear a lot of talk that the public wants us to cooperate,” adds Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), “but the part of the public that gets the most active wants exactly the opposite: the polarization.”

Says Hamilton: “I just think you have to search very far these days to find people who will stand up for the institution and let people know how important it is.”

Hamilton, who retired from the House in 1999 and is currently regarded as one of the institution’s paladins, confessed that he doesn’t “come to this debate with clean hands.” He admitted that he spent a number of years casting aspersions he came to conclude were unconstructive.

“I am a member of this institution,” he says. “I have some responsibility for success or failure of this institution. And I began to worry about the question: Who defends the Congress?”

Harry Truman, a former senator himself, ran his 1948 campaign for president as a campaign against Congress, which he referred to as the “do-nothing Congress.”

However, as Edwards is quick to point out, this kind of criticism was not directed at the institution but rather at the Republican Party’s management and policies.

Gingrich’s designs were more tactical than anything — how else to end the Democrats’ 40-year reign in one fell swoop than to burn down the place? — but they ushered in a wave of members who bought into the message. “Frankenstein created a monster he couldn’t control,” says Edwards. “He may have been pursuing a strategy, but people he recruited believed it. They were one step more radical.”

LaHood, who will retire at the end of the session, was part of that 1994 freshman class, and he says he found a number of his colleagues’ stances on the first branch mind-boggling.

“Thankfully, most of them are gone,” he says.

Even still, the footprint was left behind, and many others have stepped into it. “You began getting more members that actually refused to identify to with their institution, who considered that a sell-out and who maintained status of nonincumbent challenger,” says Brookings Institution’s Thomas Mann. “That held up for the most part during the Republican majority in the Congress, and it’s the backdrop for the lack of institutional resolve and identity during the Bush presidency.”