Teabaggers Are Dumbing-Down Congress

Our Founding Fathers weren't perfect men, but many of them were pretty smart. They produced some incredible documents and writings, including a constitution that is still workable a couple of hundred years later. The Flesch-Kincaid Test, which examines things like word usage and construction of sentences and assigns a grade level to speeches and writings, was applied to some of these past documents and they rated very well. Here are some examples:

U.S. Constitution...............17.8 grade level
Declaration of Independence...............15.1 grade level
Federalist Papers...............17.1 grade level

That's pretty impressive, but it does raise the question of just how does Congress rate in comparison. The Sunlight Foundation decided to find out. They applied the Flesch-Kincaid Test to the speeches of Congress -- and the current Congress didn't do too well. Back in 2005, Congress had an average grade level of 11.5 (slightly better than the Gettysburg Address which registered a grade level of 11.2).

But the average of the current Congress has dropped almost a full grade level. Congress now has a grade level of 10.6 -- about the level of a high school sophomore. When it is broken down by party, the Democrats had an average 10.8 grade level and the Republicans had an average 10.4 grade level. Prior to 2005, the Republican grade average was slightly higher than the Democratic average.

What has made the grade level of Congress drop? Well, it could be the new crop of Republican teabaggers that were newly-elected to Congress in the last election. The study showed that the more moderate members of Congress tended to have a higher grade level than the members with extremist views, and the new teabaggers elected to Congress have very extrme vies (and most of these new teabaggers showed the lowest grade levels). Here are the ten members of Congress with the lowest grade levels:

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-South Carolina)...............7.9
Rep. Bob Woodall (R-Georgia)...............8.0
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky)...............8.0
Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wisconsin)...............8.1
Rep Tim Griffin (R- Arkansas)...............8.1
Rep. Todd Akin (R-Missouri)...............8.1
Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Missouri)...............8.4
Rep. Tom Graves (R-Georgia)...............8.6
Rep. David Schweikert (R-Arizona)...............8.6
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin)...............8.6

Note that eight of the ten are newly elected to Congress. All of them are Republicans, and more importantly, all of them are teabaggers. Not all the congressional Republicans operate on athis low a grade level -- Rep. Dan Lungren (R-California) scored the highest grade level in Congress at 16.0. But it does seem that the teabaggers are bringing down the average grade level of both their party and the Congress in general.

NOTE -- The average American operates on a grade level between 8 and 9, and the average newspaper is printed on a grade level between 11 and 14.