Congress must have been very disappointed Tuesday when a Gallop poll found that 11 percent of Americans still think it’s doing a good job.

“Blast it all!” House Speaker John Boehner probably told his colleagues. “Sweet beet molasses,” Senate President Harry Reid likely muttered under his breath.

The two have been working so hard this year to destroy whatever shred of credibility the venerable institution had left.

So, this week, they must have recommitted themselves to dropping one last cluster bomb of incompetence upon the American people.

It hit Tuesday when House Republicans refused to approve a two-month payroll tax-cut extension.

So, let’s see what Congress has left us under the Christmas tree:

• Higher taxes for all working Americans.

• A gradual end to unemployment compensation benefits for tens of thousands of jobless people.

• A 27 percent pay cut for physicians working with Medicaid patients.

Then, members of Congress packed their bags and went on vacation. Some will ski. Some will go to the Caribbean. Others will just go home and take a well-deserved nap. Working 100 days a year is quite exhausting.

Perhaps by the time they return next year, the congressional approval rating will be in the single digits, maybe even zero.

Americans were just becoming accustomed to this back-to-the-wall style of crisis management.

There was the near shutdown of government last week that Congress managed to barely avoid. Then there was the whole supercommittee disaster, necessitated by the debt-ceiling drama that resulted in our country losing its sterling credit rating.

Certainly, Congress would find a way to extend a largely noncontroversial payroll tax cut.

It’s hard to take the full measure of the congressional dysfunction without knowing that the payroll tax cut has overwhelming support in both political parties and in both houses of Congress.

That’s how bad this has become: Congress can’t even pass bills that a majority of its members support.

Here’s another measure: Tax cuts are the easiest thing for any legislative body to pass. Republicans passed billions of dollars of them during the Bush administration, all without offsetting budget cuts.

Not only did they cut taxes, they borrowed money to fight two overseas wars.

We would like to think that 2011 was an aberration, that a do-nothing Congress will return to Washington in 2012 determined to do better.

But that seems very unlikely in a presidential election year.

The first order of business for Republicans in Congress will be making President Obama and the Democrats look bad.

The prime directive for Obama and Democrats will be much the same — doing their best to pin blame on Republicans.

We expect nothing of significance to happen until after the nation goes to the polls in November.

Winston Churchill famously said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.”

The U.S. Congress is clearly trying to prove him wrong.

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The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and editorial board.