Will the 113th Congress fare better than the 112th?

>> any better than its predecessor. let's bring in the brain trust . robert costa , washington editor for the national review . good saturday afternoon to all of you. white house in the last congress did manage to squeeze the fiscal cliff deal through. but many americans aren't happy with the results. i want to throw up numbers here. this is a gap up po -- this is a gallup poll that finds 43% of the country proves. 65% of republican s disapproved. what can the new congress, what can they do if anything to turn it around?

>> one of the major challenges is the way that the republicans have undertaken the process of arriving at any kind of legislation that the american public is behind.

>> yeah.

>> it is the process that has been completely bastardized and become so dysfunctional that 112 got labeled the do-nothing congress. and i think that part of the challenge is, certainly with president obama , and the negotiation that will happen with the debt ceiling.

>> yeah.

>> the difference between compromise versus capitulation, part of the, no question, there will be additional compromise but the hard ball fight will be around the debt ceiling and specifically the entitlement reforms that republicans seek with social security and medicare. and the challenge for the president is he willing to play hard ball . since the republicans know right now no other way to play politics.

>> i talked to a congressman, from oklahoma, he said that republicans and democrats literally rarely even talk to each other. i want you to take a listen here and we will talk about it on the other side.

>> well, what we need to do is drop the label of republican and democrat, do what is best for we were sent there to represent the people not our party.

>> and he goes on to talk about at orientation how they are on separate buses. i mean, it really does sound kwies silly, robert costa .

>> it's very easy to the wagon your finger at the political process. but the fiscal cliff has a lot of positive lessons, there are few of them right now, but one of them is when harry reid , when they are not getting along and they are not able to cobble together a deal but talks have stalled between president obama and speaker boehner, what happens when politics happens. michigan mcconnell calls up vice president biden and the deal is struck. that is politics, it's messy.

>> a lot of folks that casually follow politics will say, that it doesn't have to be that messy. there's no reason to --

>> it's always that messy, craig.

>> it's not always that messy. you know that.

>> very often congress is. we saw even on the house familiar this week. speaker boehner is having a hard time with his own party. not only with, between the parties is it rough, but it's rough within the parties.

>> perry, congress, i want to follow-up with what robert costa said there, has it always been this bad more maybe it missed something?

>> i do not agree that it has always been this bad. particularly how few laws that congress has passed that is historically unusual. a small number of laws. we should note that i'm not sure that house republicans, you talk to allen west and rand paul, they did not come to washington to pass a lot of laws. they came to washington to block what happen president obama was doing. to say they were unproductive, that w that was their intention when they came here. was to slow down legislation, it was not an accident.

>> picking up on that point, i think we are witnessing the republicans being successful at the agenda they set. they said at the beginning of president's first term, our one intention is to stop the president. insofar as they have failed in terms of passing legislation, in terms of how they stopped and blocked the president, they have been in too many ways successful.

>> we have got to pay bills here, people have to be paid here. we have a lot of folks that work here. we have to take a quick break and when we come back, i want to pick up where we left off, and what