The 118th Congress is the least productive in modern history and the reason is the real threat to American democracy
The House voted 749 times in 2023, but passed just 27 bills that have become law. That makes this Congress the least productive in decades. The reason is why American democracy hangs in the balance.
118th Congress may actually be the worst Congress in modern history from the standpoint of productivity. We quite literally have 535 legislators who don’t legislate, yet are paid $174,000 a year.
First, let’s look at some facts:
The House voted 749 times in 2023, but passed just 27 bills that have become law. That makes this Congress the least productive in decades. Only one congressional session has had a worse record: The 1931-32 Congress in the middle of the Great Depression passed 21 laws, but that Congress only met for three months.
In 2022, Congress passed 308 laws with similarly slim majorities in both chambers. So, clearly it should be possible with a split Congress to get the people's work done. While passing only 27 bills sound terrible, it's really worse than that when you take a closer look at the bills that actually got passed and those that got left on the table.
Of the 27 laws passed into law by the 118th Congress, one approved a new commemorative coin and two renamed buildings. Given the combined salaries of the members of Congress, this works out to $3,453,304 of taxpayer money per bill. And that’s a conservative number, because there is much more involved than simply the salaries of the elected representatives.
And speaking of bills that never made it through Congress -- let's also take a look at what bills they failed to pass. These include: a budget, a five-year farm bill (usually a bipartisan effort), and the reauthorization of the FAA bill, a measure designed to modernize air travel and make it safer. The right-wing Republican faction attempted to attach a requirement to defund the IRS by $14 billion to a November bill to provide emergency funding for Israel in its war against Hamas. Of course, that provision caused the bill to be DOA in the Senate. But more importantly, the Congressional Budget Office found that the bill would actually increase the federal deficit by $12.5 billion over 10 years. Daniel Werfel, head of the IRS said the increase would be even larger, putting it at $90 billion, since the spending cuts would force the agency to roll back its audits of rich taxpayers and corporations — resulting in less tax revenue. This is the kind of misguided and poorly thought out and planned legislation that the 118th Congress is becoming famous for.
Perhaps even more importantly, despite the fact that massive numbers of people in both parties believe that we have an issue at our southern border, Congress has yet to come up with a bipartisan bill to send to the president for signature. The last comprehensive immigration bill was passed in over a decade ago, in 2013 (S.744, known as the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013). For over a decade since then, we have been dealing with immigration policy that is being executed via Executive Order. But that is not the constitutional role of the Executive Branch / POTUS. The president should not be legislating from the Oval Office via Executive Orders. Both legislation and appropriations to pay for it are the responsibility of the Congress. This Congress has done next to nothing. The White House, over multiple administrations, both Democrat and Republican controlled, has repeatedly called on Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform to address the urgent situation at the US-Mexico border. In January of 2023, president Biden acknowledged to reporters that the border “is not” secure, calling on lawmakers to “Give me the money!” to fund additional resources.
Republicans claim that Democrats don’t want to address serious issues like securing the southern border -- and Democrats accuse Republicans of wasting time on frivolous issues, like trying to impeach President Joe Biden. Yet the reality is that NEITHER party has an excuse for failing to work on bills that have bipartisan interest.
At times, the House of Representatives has looked more like a high-school locker room full of testosterone-infused teenagers than it has the House of Representative of the United States Congress.
The House of Representatives took five days and 15 votes to elect a speaker. This was the most protracted vote since 1859. Speaker McCarthy was later deposed, some 10 months later, which was also a historical first in the House of Representatives. In 234 years, that had not happened in the House of Representatives.
Then the Republican-controlled House took three weeks to elect a new speaker, resulting in a further complete stoppage with regard to getting the people's work done.
During this 118th Congress, three House members have been censured and one removed from office. This is also a dubious record for any Congress, by any measurement.
At one point, Rep. Chip Roy, a MAGA Republican from Texas, was so openly frustrated in the lack of production by the 118th Congress that he openly proclaimed to the Republican causus: “One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one! — that I can go campaign on and say we did. Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.” That says an aweful lot when a MAGA Republican is complaining about nothing getting done in a Republican controlled Congress, especially since the MAGA crowd themselves have never been able to develop a track record of any kind that shows a string to successes in "getting things done".
We're in 2024 now, folks. It is an election year and the presumed candidates are neck-and-neck in the polls. It is urgent that our Congress address some extremely important things; among them, an aid package for the Ukraine and Israel, passing a Farm Bill, and immigration policy reforms/changes. What cannot be allowed to happen again is another government shutdown.
But for a third time since Republicans took control of the House, the federal government now again teeters on the edge of a shutdown. The Republican Party's far-right wing has been resolute in three things: retribution against Democrats and so-called "RINO's", impeaching the sitting president (without facts in evidence of any kind, currently), and making severe funding cuts in Federal Agency budgets. Funding for some agencies is slated to expire Jan. 19 and the rest on Feb. 2, and Republicans still don’t have enough support within their own party in Congress to pass the severe cuts in federal agency budgets that are being demanded by the party’s far-right wing.
This year we will vote for the presidency as well as both houses of Congress. Unfortunately, what we can expect as a result are plenty of bills that have no chance of becoming law. They will exist with one, singular intent; that being, to provide political talking points.
If the evidence that the Republicans have been promising against Joe Biden is not substantial and doesn't turn up quickly, this will not go well for the GOP in November. Vince Galko, a northeastern Pennsylvania-based GOP consultant recently commented: “If the evidence isn’t there and it’s viewed more as a political stunt, it’s going to hurt Republicans more than it’s going to help them, particularly with suburban and independent voters”.
House Republicans have spent an inordinate amount of the people’s time and money in an attempt to find some “dirt” on president Biden. Until now, they have continuously pointed toward "evidence" that they say undercuts president Biden's claim that he never had anything to do with the foreign business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden. While then vice-president Biden did meet briefly with some of his son’s business associates, there is no testimony or evidence that has been presented indicating that he had any substantive discussions with his son’s business associates or that he changed government policy to benefit any of Hunter Biden’s ventures. Some of the major examples that Republicans are citing suggest questionable behavior on face value, but closer review in every case, thus far, has shown that the referenced comments were taken out of context, or that "Republicans have omitted key messages in email or text chains that often cast the communications in a more innocuous light". Despite GOP claims that somewhere between 10 percent to half of the money from Hunter Biden’s business deals went to his father, Republicans have failed to find any evidence of profit by the current president, other than some family loan repayments that occurred during the Trump presidency.
Meanwhile, former president Trump's businesses were recently found to have received at least $7.8 million from foreign governments and businesses in 20 countries, including China ($5.6 million), Saudi Arabia and Qatar (among others) according to the House Oversight Committee. But the Republicans, once again, “switched on the cloaking device” and claimed that this has “already been litigated”. The fact is that the only reason that the Supreme Court tossed the emoluments cases against Trump was a soft-ball ruling by a conservative-dominated court that “he was no longer in office" (SCOTUS sent the case back to the lower courts with instructions to dismiss them as moot, because Mr. Trump is no longer in office, and vacated the opinions from the 2nd U.S Circuit Court of Appeals and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals). This ruling was made despite the fact that the case was filed in 2017, during Trump’s presidency. But, in the process of doing that they also set a major precedent by ruling on the definition of “emoluments” for the first time, finding that the Constitution prohibits federal officials from accepting almost anything of value from foreign or domestic governments. This will have some significant effect going forward since the decision will serve as precedent that prevent future presidents from using the presidency or other federal office for personal financial gain, as President Trump did.
As usual, while the GOP is chanting “Hunter, Hunter!” there is hard evidence of former president Trump having routinely violated the emoluments clause. All we seem to hear from the GOP right-wing adherents, and from our Congress, is "impeach Biden, Hunter's laptop"! This is, of course, pure deflection. Their strategy is to take American’s attention away from the many, many fundamental issues and legal problems of former president Trump and direct attention toward president Biden. The right-wing Republicans, as they always have been, are in favor of the Constitution and the Rule of Law when, AND ONLY WHEN, it benefits their right-wing narrative.
Even in the case that evidence is found showing that the dollar value of what Joe Biden is being accused of approaches what Donald Trump accepted as president (it's not), one would think that the law would apply to both Trump and Biden EQUALLY. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
This same uneven application of the Rule of Law seems to be leveraging the 118th Congress, resulting in their historically poor performance. The GOP controls Congress and doesn’t seem to care about the people's work — unless the people's work can be defined as obtaining retribution against the rival Democrats.
What is abundantly clear is that all of these issues are not pertinent to what should be important in the election of POTUS (Executive Branch). However, the battle for the soul of American democracy has extended itself deeply into the fiber of the Congress (Legislative Branch) and the Courts (Judicial Branch).
And that is, unfortunately, the state of our political system. It is why Congress has ceased to function. And it is why Joe Biden is absolutely correct when he says that with this election, American Democracy hangs in the balance. When it comes to honesty, integrity and character, one of these two presidential candidates holds up. The other one is Donald Trump.
Sources:
https://www.wkrg.com/news/congress-has-one-of-its-least-productive-years-ever/
https://www.wuft.org/nation-world/2023/12/21/118th-congress-to-be-the-most-unproductive-in-decades/
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/21/1221040449/118th-congress-to-be-the-most-unproductive-in-decades
https://www.post-gazette.com/news/politics-nation/2023/12/31/congress-return-january-senate-house/stories/202312280108
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/us/politics/republican-claims-biden-impeachment-inquiry.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-tosses-trump-emoluments-case/
Supreme Court Instructions to lower courts for dismissal
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/25/politics/emoluments-supreme-court-donald-trump-case/index.html