John Dingell is a congressional dinosaur and even might admit it himself.

The longest-serving member of Congress is leaving office at the end of this year and he doesn’t sound like someone who’s going to miss the place it has become.

Instead, he seems to be missing the place it used to be.

Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, is now 87 and has seen lots of change over many decades of service. He has led powerful House of Representatives committees and has put his name on key legislation. He worked to enact laws with the help of Republicans — and it’s that bipartisanship that appears to have taken leave of Capitol Hill.

Dingell expressed understandable frustration with the new climate in an interview with USA Today.

“We’ve accomplished very little,” Dingell said of recent Congresses. “We’ve been engaged in all manner of small, spiteful fights. We have failed to carry out our responsibilities in addressing the big issues the day.”

The culprit? It’s the tea party wing of the “other” party, the Republicans who share power with Democrats on Capitol Hill, according to Dingell.

“A lot of these new ones,” he said of his junior colleagues, “have no awareness … of the need to work together, no awareness of the need for members to be friends off the congressional campus, no need they see in their lives to be responsible in terms of building trust and relationships to let us work together.”

Dingell is far from being alone in wishing for the good old days. But, indeed, it’s the “good old days” that have become the target of the tea party members’ own anger and frustration.

Have they made Congress a better place to serve the people who sent them there? John Dingell doesn’t believe so.

The old curmudgeon is glad to be leaving and will leave the partisan bickering to others.