It's not your imagination. Congress really does suck. Historically so, apparently.

NPR talked to a number of historians all of whom confirmed our current Congress is the worst this country has seen in over 150 years.

"I think you'd have to go back to the 1850s to find a period of congressional dysfunction like the one we're in today," says Daniel Feller, a professor of U.S. history at the University of Tennessee.

Feller, who specializes in the Jacksonian, Antebellum and Civil War periods, points specifically to 1849-1860 when Congress sometimes struggled for months to even elect a speaker of the House.

Other periods of governmental deadlock include Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction presidency, Woodrow Wilson's conflict with Congress over the League of Nations and the fights between President Truman and the "do-nothing" 80th Congress in 1947-48.

"None of those involved the level of conflict within Congress itself that we see today," Feller says.

In the pantheon of also-rans for least effective Congresses, [Thomas Mann, senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington] would add a contentious period circa 1910 when long-serving Republican House Speaker Joseph Cannon was ousted from his post mostly by renegades in his own party. There were also bruising fights over the Depression-era New Deal...."There have been plenty of times when the rhetorical heat has been high, sometimes higher than now," Feller says. "What's most amazing today is not fiery words, but the inability to do necessary business."

Congress Really Is As Bad As You Think, Scholars Say [NPR]