There’s still the larger issue of a one-year agreement. The conference committee may not meet until the House and Senate return to Washington in late January, giving them just a few weeks to come to an agreement. Typically conference committees with this kind of high profile end up getting decided in back rooms by the party leadership anyway. So the conference committee thing is largely a dodge so Republicans can say they got something in this exchange. They really didn’t. They politically gave in to the Democratic demand.

Raising taxes on working people is not the only winning political strategy the Republicans in Congress are giving the average American this holiday season.

During a pro forma session designed to block recess appointments (streams crossing), Steny Hoyer asks for unanimous consent to bring up the Senate two-month stopgap on the payroll tax, unemployment insurance and the doc fix. Instead of just objecting to UC, the presiding officer, in this case Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA), just ignores Hoyer and gavels down the session, walking away. This allows Hoyer to grandstand on CSPAN.

Just when it seemed almost mathematically impossible for Congress to get any more unpopular, it manages to sink again to an incredible new low. Congress’s job approval rating is the lowest it has ever been since Gallup started asking the question back in 1974.

The House of Representatives officially rejected the bipartisan agreement that passed the Senate for a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut, extended unemployment benefits and a doctor’s fix to prevent a 27% reduction in Medicare reimbursement rates. They did so under a complicated scheme whereby members did not vote on the Senate deal itself, with the rejection of the Senate deal implicit in the exchange.

We may live in a world where nothing gets done in Congress, but thank goodness Republicans are not so intransigent and will be bipartisan about the really important stuff.

As part of the omnibus spending bill, the federal government will delay enforcement of new regulations for increased energy efficiency in light bulbs. Republicans claim that this delay, achieved through blocking Energy Department funding for enforcement through Fiscal Year 2012, will “save” the incandescent light bulb, but in reality incandescent bulbs were never banned. And light bulb manufacturers put a lot of money and effort into meeting the standard, so they oppose the delay altogether.

Today was supposed to be the final day of the Congressional session, as the House would return to finish off the payroll tax deal negotiated and passed through the Senate. But that blew up over the weekend. We now have a regular business day in the House, with votes in the afternoon. But it’s not clear exactly what they’ll do with the Senate’s payroll tax deal.

You could see this one coming. John Boehner empowered Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid to come up with a compromise on the payroll tax cut and other expiring measures which could break a filibuster in the Senate. They couldn’t get the full-year measure done, so they agreed to a two-month extension with a pay-for and an acceleration of the Keystone XL decision. So now Boehner had to go back to his caucus, with a deal he didn’t personally negotiate, to sell it to them. That sell didn’t go over well, with many House conservatives, including the other members of the leadership team, criticizing the deal.

Is this the worst Congress in our lifetimes? The public now gives Congress its worst performance rating in the 20 years in which pollsters have been asking the question. Some of this new found disapproval of Congress is probably the result of the prolonged economic downturn. But a lot probably has to do with the fact that this Congress truly is behaving horribly.