Reviews coming in on 111th Congress

With the congressional session nearing an end, the reviews are starting to come in.

-- "The 111th Congress made more law affecting more Americans since the 'Great Society' legislation of the 1960s," according to Bloomberg News.

"For all of its ambitious achievement, the 111th Congress... also witnessed a voter backlash driven by a 9.6 percent unemployment rate that cost Democrats control of the House and diminished their Senate majority."

--"The common complaint with politicians is that they make all these promises and then head to Washington and do nothing. Whatever you can say about the 111th, you can't say that," writes Ezra Klein, a liberal blogger for The Washington Post.

"That is not to say it hasn't failed on at least some of what it promised to do," Klein says. "We still don't have a national energy strategy, of course. There are dozens of nominees sitting on their hands, and the collapse of the omnibus spending bill means the federal government will only be funded until March -- at which point you can expect a Republican House ....to play some serious hardball."

-- "With an approval rating in the teens, Congress right now is about as popular as Julian Assange at the State Department's Christmas Party," writes Mark Murray of NBC News. "But lost in the poll numbers and the voters' message in November is this one unmistakable fact: This Congress... accomplished more, legislatively, than any other Congress since the 1960s (the Great Society) or the 1930s (the New Deal)."