Anger at Congress surfaces at town hall meetings

Craig Schneider and Jeremy Redmon report in the AJC:

Georgia's members of Congress, returning home from Washington after months of partisan bickering, are getting an earful.

At town hall meetings across the state, they're hearing, sometimes in-your-face, that people are fed up with the political gridlock that many associate with the debt ceiling mess, the downgrading of the nation's credit rating and the tanking of the stock market.

The mood at a handful of town hall meetings attended by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution bore out a recent New York Times/CBS News poll that showed 82 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing.

Another recent poll, by CNN/Opinion Research, found American voters uncharacteristically fed up with their individual representatives, as well as with Congress as an institution. Only 41 percent of those surveyed said their own representative should be re-elected.

Despite the undercurrent of anger, these gatherings lacked the yelling and finger-pointing that marked public meetings in 2009 about the health care overhaul. Occasionally, though, people turned up the heat.

(Staff writers Aaron Edwards and Jim Galloway contributed to this report.)