One has to wonder: Do the 535 members of Congress have a clue as to how inept, lazy, greedy, unethical, fiscally irresponsible and childishly partisan they look to most Americans who live outside the Beltway?

Take Congress’ budget deliberations – please. The 109th Congress adjourned Dec. 9 without having passed nine of 11 appropriations bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.

Why can’t Congress adopt a new budget on time as city councils and school boards throughout America do routinely? As it stands, federal agencies will operate through mid-February at the same basic funding levels as the prior fiscal year, regardless of actual needs.

The best printable adjective with which to describe the 109th Congress is “lazy.” It was in session scarcely more than 100 days this year and rarely distinguished itself when it was. Many of its biggest headline-makers were those convicted, charged, being investigated or suspected of various criminal or unethical acts. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, William Jefferson and Mark Foley pop to mind.

This year also revealed just how closely some members of Congress were tied to sleazeball lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who has done his bit for good government by going to prison.

Statesmanship, never at epidemic levels in Washington, seems a quaint relic. Most members of Congress are unwilling to consistently tackle big, tough, vital issues such as Social Security reform, tax reform, immigration reform and federal budget deficits in an open-minded, dead serious and bipartisan manner. Instead, they focus on less politically perilous activities such as granting tax breaks to special-interest groups that, in turn, shower them with campaign donations.

A partisan rancor pervades Congress. It seems that every important issue divides predominantly along party lines, whether it is Social Security or fuel-economy standards for vehicles. As a result, little of great import gets done.

A recent Cox News Service story contained this damning remark from Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution and co-author of “The Broken Branch,” a book about the malfunctioning Congress: “The 109th Congress vies for the title of the all-time worst Congress. It spent little time in session, it failed to pass budget resolutions and appropriations bills, there was no serious oversight of the disaster in Iraq, there were no substantive policy achievements and corrupt members were forced from Congress.”

A major contributor to the excessively vitriolic and petty partisanship between Republicans and Democrats is the decline of political moderates in Washington, most notably in the GOP.

A recent Washington Post article, published after the Democrats’ impressive victories in the Nov. 7 elections, said the 110th Congress convening in January could have “the fewest moderates since the 19th century,” based on an analysis of voting records by professors Keith Poole of the University of California at San Diego and Howard Rosenthal of New York University. Eight of the House’s 20 most-moderate Republicans lost their seats, the article said. The study defined a “moderate” as someone “whose votes consistently fall near the middle of the political spectrum on both fiscal and social issues.”

Almost half of House Republicans were moderates 30 years ago compared with well under 10 percent today, Poole concluded.

The partisan polarization has been worsened greatly by hyper-aggressive, socially conservative Republicans such as the now-departed DeLay, who faces pending criminal charges in Texas, and by President Bush, a right-wing ideologue who, contrary to his 2000 campaign pledge, has been a divider and not a uniter. (He now says he’s The Decider, but he’s having a devil of a time deciding what to do about the mess in Iraq.)

Looking back at the discredited 109th Congress, I am confident that the 110th will perform better simply because it would be difficult to do any worse.

There are some bright, principled members of Congress who truly want to tackle the big, tough issues in an intelligent, bipartisan manner. It’s just a shame they’re so badly outnumbered by numerous lackluster colleagues.