Anti-incumbency's spiked to a new peak, anger at the government has tied its high, Americans' customary approval of their own representative in Congress has hit a 16-year low -- and a new ABC News index measuring all this pent-up discontent is well above the boiling point.

It has all the makings of a hot political summer.

PITTSBURGH – Seizing on a disastrous oil spill to advance a cause, President Barack Obama on Wednesday called on Congress to roll back billions of dollars in tax breaks for oil and pass a clean-energy bill that he says would help the nation end its dependence on fossil fuels.

Obama predicted that he would find the political support for legislation that would dramatically alter the way Americans fuel their homes and cars, including placing a price on carbon pollution, even though such legislation is politically divisive and remains bogged in the Senate.

A third of registered voters are inclined to reelect their representatives in Congress, the fewest since the Republican Party rode voter discontent to control of the House and Senate 16 years ago, according to a new ABC News-Washington Post poll.

Nearly six in 10 said they'll instead look for someone new come the fall elections.

A third of registered voters are inclined to reelect their representatives in Congress, the fewest since the Republican Party rode voter discontent to control of the House and Senate 16 years ago, according to a new ABC News-Washington Post poll.

Nearly six in 10 said they'll instead look for someone new come the fall elections.

WASHINGTON – Republican Scott Brown said fixing the nation's ailing economy would be his top priority as he prepared Thursday to take his Senate seat a week earlier than he had planned.

'It's a new era and it's really time to get to work,' Brown told a throng of reporters as he arrived on Capitol Hill.

With Brown seated, Democrats will lose their supermajority and Republicans will gain the 41st vote they can use to block President Barack Obama's agenda.

WASHINGTON – The morning after President Barack Obama urged Congress to finish the job on health care overhaul, a key moderate Democrat on Thursday likened the sweeping legislation to a patient hovering near death.

'I think it's on life support, but it still has a pulse,' said Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. 'If there is a way forward, some of us are really committed to finding it. It doesn't look clear how we're going to move it.'

WASHINGTON – The Senate has rejected a plan backed by President Barack Obama to create a bipartisan task force to tackle the deficit this year.

The special deficit panel would have attempted to produce a plan combining tax cuts and spending curbs that would have been voted on after the midterm elections. But the plan garnered just 53 votes in the 100-member Senate, not enough because 60 votes were required. Anti-tax Republicans joined with Democrats wary of being railroaded into cutting Social Security and Medicare to reject the idea.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is seeking to reassure voters he's determined to create jobs while his administration is trying to protect an architect of the increasingly unpopular banking bailout that may have helped prevent a financial collapse.

Obama's efforts on the economy come after a Massachusetts Senate election this past week that suggested voter unrest when Republican Scott Brown claimed a Senate seat in Democratic hands for more than a half-century. Brown gives the GOP a 41st vote in the Senate, taking away the Democrats' supermajority and threatening Obama's agenda.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The future of a US climate law is hanging in the balance in Congress as lawmakers gear up for crucial midterm elections amid a persistent economic slump, experts say.

Further reducing the impetus, UN climate talks in Copenhagen ended last month with a non-binding agreement to limit warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (two Celsius) that did not set binding targets to reduce the emissions of gases scientists say are heating up the world's atmosphere to dangerous levels.