Some highlights from the talk given on our campus this evening in South Bend by Lee H. Hamilton, who served in the House of Representatives for a district in southern Indiana for 34 years, was co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, and who now heads the Center on Congress at Indiana University in Bloomington:

• Congress is now deeply unpopular and flagrantly unproductive. Very few Congresses in history can match the present Congress in futility.

• This Congress can't pass anything. It can't repeal anything.

• Most of the committees of the Congress have collapsed.

• Omnibus bill? No, it's an abomination. No accountability, no transparency, put together in the dark of night, voted on in the morning.

• NSA is the most dramatic expansion of government power in my lifetime. The amazing passivity and timidity of Congress...the arrogance...Congress didn't see the NSA as a subject for public debate.

• Democracy is not a result. Democracy is a process.

• You couldn't get a single sentence in the US Constitution without compromise. Not one single sentence.

Mr. Hamilton also advised that the best way for citizens to influence a US representative is to gather a group of four or five well-prepared folks together, make an appointment for the next time the representative is back in the home district, buy her a cup of coffee and talk face to face.

He was proud of the deliberative traditions and the history of the Congress and gave the impression that it has abandoned most of its best features.