A part-time Congress.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Try this one at your place of employment: Get into the habit of working two or three days a week, and when the boss says you're expected to show up Monday through Friday, accuse him of not caring about families.

That's how Rep. Jack Kingston responded to incoming House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's announcement that the next Congress would begin with a five-day-a-week schedule. "Keeping us here eats away at families," the Georgia Republican told The Washington Post. Hoyer and the Democrats who will soon take control of the House, Kingston charged, "could care less about families - that's what this says."

Kingston's claim that work is anti-family is not the official position of either party, but many members of Congress grumbled about Hoyer's edict. In a typical work week, members of the 109th Congress reported for duty late Tuesday and left the Capitol by midday Thursday. For this they were paid $165,200 a year.

Members of Congress haven't been idle on their Thursday-through-Monday weekends. Senators and representatives have to spend time in their home states or districts - meeting with constituents, consulting with local officials and the like. Mostly, however, they need time away from the office to raise money for their next campaigns.

Fundraising is such an all-consuming chore that little time for lawmaking remains. Members of the 109th Congress were in session only 103 days in 2006 - seven days fewer than the "do-nothing Congress" of 1948. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute calculates that Congress spent an average of 125 days a year in session during the first six years of the Bush presidency, down from 161 in the 1960s and '70s. The average American with a full-time job puts in 243 days.

When lawmakers spend their time in session approving warrantless wiretaps, attempting to prolong Terri Schiavo's life and handing out tax breaks to those who need them least, it's tempting to conclude that the country is well-served by long recesses and short work weeks. But the 109th Congress left a lot of important work undone. It finished work on only two spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, dumping that responsibility in the laps of the next Congress.

The entire nation is poorly served by such a lack of performance. Just one example: Congress failed to renew legislation compensating counties for the decline in revenue from the harvest of timber on federal lands. Lane and Douglas counties will be hardest hit. On the last day of the session, a proposal to renew the payments and finance them with the early implementation of an already-approved tax withholding provision had the support of both Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert and incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposed the renewal, and that's all it took to defeat it.

This points to the real problem: Members of Congress have been able to spend little time in session and more time fundraising because many important decisions have been made by a handful of leaders in close consultation with special interests and the White House. Many of the 435 House members and 100 senators have been irrelevant - marginalized if in the minority, forced to march in lockstep if in the majority.

Americans sensed this, and voted for a change. The Democrats will ignore that call for change at their peril.