Here is another good news/bad news column about the 112th Congress.

House Republicans have broken the hugely successful spectrum auction authorization first effected in 1993 and also delayed for many years any possibility that digital broadcast spectrum that is almost entirely unused can be repurposed to serve the growing demands for wireless broadband.

In "It’s Even Worse Than It Looks," congressional scholars Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of AEI identify two overriding problems that have led Congress — and the United States — to the brink of institutional collapse. Mann and Ornstein call on the media as well as the public at large to focus on the true causes of dysfunction.

The only real issue in Congress worthy of continued discussion remains the super committee. It is a true measure of the dysfunction in Congress and the political process that this panel, with an unprecedented opportunity to shape a positive fiscal future and avoid a potential global depression in the coming year, is floundering as the endgame approaches.

Neither the framers nor subsequent political leaders had built in to the constitutional framework any plans to reconstitute Congress in the event of a catastrophe like 9/11. I called for Congressional leaders to at least create a commission to study the problem and potential solutions.

If ever we need evidence of ideology run rampant, the House vote to eliminate the annual American Community Survey and the Economic Census to provide basic information on the state of businesses and industries in the country and data used for generating quarterly gross domestic product estimates is exhibit A.