In 2005, Congress failed the middle class.

This is the blunt assessment of the nonpartisan Drum Major Institute for Public Policy (DMI), which today released its third annual scorecard, Congress at the Midterm: Their 2005 Middle-Class Record. Aimed at assessing Congress's voting records on issues of concern to the nation's middle class and "those who aspire to a middle-class standard of living"--surely the vast majority of Americans--Congress at the Midterm is a forceful indictment of Congress's performance and the party in power.

"In vote after vote," the scorecard notes, "Congress disdained the concerns of middle-class Americans and opted instead to favor the already wealthy and powerful: a surefire recipe for a shrinking middle class." From the passage of a bankruptcy bill that benefited credit card companies but squeezed middle-class families already overwhelmed by debt, to the failure of legislation to raise the federal minimum wage for the first time in nearly a decade, to the House's vote to repeal the estate tax on the nation's most privileged heirs, the scorecard paints a grim, but devastatingly accurate, picture of what our elected representatives have been up to under the Capitol Dome. Bear in mind this is a Bush/Neocon controlled congress