The Fix today has a post about the newly released digital version of Vital Statistics on Congress, a partnership between between a few think tanks that contains reams of enlightening data about the institution.
Among the more interesting examples is a table showing the partisan polarization over the years. Chris Cillizza’s take:
There is, really, only one thing you need to understand if you want to see why Congress doesn’t do much of anything these days. And that one thing is this: We are living in a time of historic polarization between the two parties.
It’s clear from the chart in the report that the parties are as far apart as they’ve been in the modern era:
