Eat it, middle class people! That's what 99% of Republicans and a depressingly large number of Democrats in Congress said to you last year.

I've always known they don't really care about the poor, but in a small way it's shocking how little people seem to be talking about how much they also don't care about the middle class.

Kudos to the folks at the Institute for keeping such a handy scorecard. Smart progressive candidates will use this in their campaigns, seems to me like this would be an easy ad to write. From the report:

• Neither chamber of Congress demonstrated acceptable levels of support for middle-class Americans. In both the House and the Senate, more than half of the legislators failed. In the House, only one in five representatives received an A, while the proportion of As was fewer than one in ten among Senators.

• Both parties in both chambers of Congress fared worse than they did in last year’s report, but the slide among Democrats was particularly pronounced in 2005. Compared to last year, the proportion of Senate Democrats earning As declined by more than half. The House Democrats, who had no failing members in 2004, experienced a failure rate of 11 percent in 2005.

• While Democrats received lower grades than last year, the Republicans did still worse, with only a handful among them even managing
to eke out a passing grade on the issues of concern to their middle-class constituents.

• While Democratic support for the middle class was admirable when it came to issues like raising the minimum wage, preventing harmful budget cuts and saving Social Security, support dissolved when powerful industries lobbied for legislation that would increase their profits at the expense of the middle class, such as the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (HR 6), Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (S 256) and the Class Action Fairness Act (S 5).

• Republicans showed the most support for the middle class on the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act (HR 3045), also known as CAFTA, where party leadership had to work intensively to ensure the legislation’s narrow passage. Even on this bill, though, overall GOP support was not sufficient to rise above an F grade.

• Out of the 16 votes considered, the middle-class position was never successful at any point: each bill opposed by the middle class passed and each bill supported by the middle class failed. Nevertheless, there were a number of very close votes, where just a few legislators changing their minds would have altered the results on momentous legislation like CAFTA, the minimum wage and budget cuts.