(FORTUNE Magazine) – Questions abound about the working habits of the U.S. Congress. One question is: What does it mean to say that Congress is ''in session,'' as it is repeatedly stated to be nowadays, when in fact everybody is away? Wait. We ask unanimous consent to strike that remark. Not everybody is away all the time. The harvest of news stories we are looking at -- filed by AP, UPI, the New York Times, and the Washington Post -- do not really go that far. The stories merely state that the Senators usually take off one week out of four, that many of them turn invisible on Mondays and Fridays of the other three weeks, and, furthermore, that the whole gang expects to vamoose for the month of August. Also, it seems that the House attendance standards are even more finely attuned to the needs of folks who have to spend a lot of time on the hustings raising money and yet also hanker to just lie on the beach occasionally. Another question is whether low-key Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine will lose his accustomed cool over the meager attendance levels. This question was not exactly considered riveting by yours truly, but it possibly has more centrality in George's own thinking, or at least he seems to have played along with media folks raising this question. An AP piece on June 9 says George is getting frustrated by the absenteeism and thinking of ceasing to be Mr. Nice Guy. The UPI story says Mitchell is feeling ''thwarted,'' suffers from ''frustration,'' and recently took the Senate floor to formally lecture his colleagues, which must have been frustrating indeed given that hardly any of them were there to hear the scolding. Then there was the Washington Post report of June 23 that Mitchell had ''finally run out of patience'' and actually scheduled a vote for 9:30 A.M. on a Friday. The cause of this precedent-defying event was said to be a mounting backlog of laws unpassed because nobody was around to pass them. This brings us to the third and ultimate question -- the one you possibly started looking for ten sentences back -- which is whether passage of the laws in question, and congressional attendance in general, are truly good for the people, as inferentially postulated by all the journalistic dopesters. Our own instinct would be to vote Nay on the pending question. Five years ago, this department ran an ''Only in America'' item about an airline's tumultuous court battle with a blind lady who insisted on her right to sit in the row with emergency exits. The UPI story about Mitchell's frustrations mentions his particular angst at not being able to speedily pass a bill ''that forbids discrimination against blind persons in airline seating assignments.'' Ah, but August is coming.