After pushing the nation to the brink of default, Congress went home last month to face a credit-rating downgrade, spiraling financial markets, and surly, scared voters. Returning after Labor Day — with their approval ratings in the tank — lawmakers vowed to do better, only to fall off the wagon again this week with post-midnight fights that threaten the normal operations of government as well as badly needed disaster aid for the victims of recent storms and flooding.

It’s become less a Congress than a free-fire zone. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has been forced to operate since last month on a highly restrictive “immediate needs” basis, is now days from running out of cash. The Democratic Senate is taking the weekend off to “cool” down — and do a little fundraising — before a showdown vote Monday night. And the Republican House has left entirely for a recess, convinced it’s the wronged party and seemingly totally blind to how its own rigidity has contributed to the crisis.

Most damning: This is the easy stuff. The bill at issue is a relatively simple stopgap continuing resolution, or CR, to keep the government operating until mid-November while tougher issues are addressed. If this is a crisis, what are world financial markets to think of Washington’s ability to meet its promises in August — coming up still with at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction in less than two months?

“I have never seen it like this,” said Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), a World War II hero now closing in on a half century in Washington. Indeed, some even liken this Congress to the pre-Civil War years — the air filled with moral certainty and calamity around the corner.

The grim economic news since August contributes to a sense of helplessness and fractured power. This is very much a Congress divided three ways — Republican, Democratic and tea party. Now it is also one living through a period of joblessness and strained resources that is beyond anything members have known in their lifetime.

The nation is in serious peril, and this breeds an anxious, even scared rank and file which is what really drove this latest crisis — from the bottom not the top.

“None of us have ever experienced this level of job loss,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.). “We have no rainy day fund. We’re fighting a battle with little or no reserves, and I don’t think the Congress knows how to do it. I’m not pretending I do. This is a tough one.”

All that demands strong leadership — a quality sorely lacking. And this is a story that begins and ends with the now strained relationship between Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

These are two men who seem to like one another, enjoy good staff relations, and have a wealth of experience in bipartisan negotiations. Boehner came up through two House committees, Labor and Education and Agriculture, where he showed an ability to reach across party lines. Reid was a tireless Democrat whip before becoming leader and thrives on the vote swapping so synonymous with the Senate Appropriations Committee on which he sat for many years.

Yet for all this talent, each man was too weak or too restrained politically to maintain their partnership even as the White House took a walk — not even issuing the standard statement of administration policy on the bill in question.

To hear Boehner’s side, the speaker came back from August, instructing his aides to avoid precisely this type of drama. Deals were worked out to move transportation and trade-related bills and Boehner felt he had reached a deal with Reid on the CR as well.

The speaker kept faith with the new spending caps of $1.043 trillion for 2012, an important priority for Reid. Disaster aid would be included for 2011 in light of FEMA’s dire straits, albeit under terms that kept 2011 appropriations under the 2011 targets agreed to in the last shutdown crisis in April.

Reid’s camp says no deal was ever reached, precisely because of the limits on disaster aid. Instead, by this account, there was a tacit understanding that each leader would play his cards: Boehner with the CR and Reid with a free-standing disaster aid bill to test the waters for adding more assistance. After seeing the outcome, they could reassess the situation.

Whatever the truth, the first rounds were a setback for Boehner. Reid’s bill, doubling the level of disaster aid, picked up a surprising 62 Senate votes, including 10 Republicans. Days later Boehner’s CR went down, having lost 48 of his own Republicans upset with the spending levels in the bill.

Reid waited for the phone to ring from Boehner. His staff reached out to the speaker’s with some new ideas. Instead, smarting from his loss and feeling betrayed, Boehner moved further right and rallied his party to pass virtually the same CR with minimal Democratic support early Friday morning.

Hours later, the two men spoke briefly — when Boehner finally returned Reid’s call, which the leader took in the Senate cloakroom. Feeling rebuffed, the Nevada Democrat went back on the floor and promptly tabled the House resolution — ironically joined by same tea party Republicans whole House allies had put so much pressure on Boehner to move further right.

Indeed, the great influence of the tea party thus far may be less in its numbers than its ability to discourage Republican leaders from reaching across the aisle.

When the stakes were highest in the debt crisis, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took this risk and was a major architect of the August accords. But more often, the Kentucky Republican is less of the dealmaker he once was and will refuse to do anything that threatens Boehner, held in check by the tea party right.

Over time, the power of the tea party minority has bred its own counter-weight on the left; instead of three parts, this may be more honestly a Congress broken into four.

Boehner went into the CR fight with the fulsome support of Rep. Norman Dicks, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. But Dicks then reversed himself under pressure from the groundswell of anger from the progressive left over offsets seen as threatening jobs.

In the same way, Reid’s ability to strike a deal is hampered more and more by the anger in his caucus that Senate Democrats are being pushed around by what’s really a minority in the House. Much to the chagrin of the White House and Republicans alike, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has fed on this anger and often seems to overpower his friend Reid.

In this context, the disaster aid fight was the perfect storm of storms.

Schumer’s own New York suffered serious damage from Hurricane Irene and he was quick to seize on the disaster aid issue with an almost jingoistic message, calling on Congress to come together “for America.” The Republican spending offsets — taking $1.5 billion from a high-tech manufacturing loan program for the auto industry — dovetailed with this theme by waving a red cape at job-hungry Democrats and the industrial Midwest.

Boehner’s camp argues correctly that $2.5 billion will still remain in the Bush-era fund but to a surprising degree, the speaker failed to take advantage of his chances to temper the cut and win back bipartisan support.

The more agile “old” Boehner, freer to move on his own, could have easily restored $500 million to the cut without violating any budget rules. Instead, the speaker went in the opposite direction and, to appease his right, added $100 million in new cuts at the expense of another loan fund important to environmentalists.

What’s left out of the discussions — and seems to skew Boehner’s calculations — is how much FEMA money is really an issue for both parties — not some gift or quid-pro-quo for pro-government Democrats.

The truth is the whole 2011 disaster aid portion of the CR closely mirrors one approved in June and engineered then by leading Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee from Alabama and Missouri after devastating tornadoes in their states. It was attached then to the Homeland Security budget for 2012 and then taken off the shelf, with some modifications, for the CR.

Democrats always opposed taking $1.5 billion from the advanced technology auto fund which exceeded the $1 billion in aid. But coming off the job growth last spring, this was justified because of the comparative outlay rates for the two accounts.

Three months later, circumstances are different. The recovery had dramatically slowed and with just days left to the fiscal year, there will no real outlays in 2011 making the extra $500 million cut much more a political concession to the tea party than a needed offset to stay under budget caps.

Would Boehner changing this have turned the situation around alone: probably not. Would it have gotten both sides talking again about a true halfway mark: maybe so.

“We dropped to 12,” Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.) told his colleagues ruefully before Friday’s post-midnight vote, speaking of congressional approval ratings. “I guess we’re trying to get into the single digits.”