“We may be moving a little bit away from paralysis, but we’re still dysfunctional,” said Sen. “We did it in our first year, with things like the anti-Asian hate crimes legislation, the competition bill, and the bipartisan infrastructure package, and these two weeks now represent a productive continuation of that commitment.” “As I have always said, from my first day as majority leader, we will work in a bipartisan way whenever we can,” he said. Schumer took to the Senate floor last month to crow about all the bipartisan achievements under his watch. The typically slower-moving Senate - which already needs to pass a spending package for the current fiscal year, possibly with an emergency supplemental for supporting Ukraine, and then begin work on next year’s appropriations bills - now also has the Supreme Court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to address. The question of whether Congress gets to those issues is one of logistics as much as will. monopoly and competition statutes that could upend the last half-century of antitrust law. There are also realistic hopes for bills that would overhaul the Electoral Count Act, ease the potential for financial mayhem when the benchmark LIBOR interest rate stops publishing next summer, and change U.S. Both have already passed the House by overwhelming margins. The Senate also appears poised to pass a major Postal Service overhaul and may act on a reauthorization and revamp of the Violence Against Women Act, which lapsed in 2019. In February, Congress banned pretrial arbitration for employee sexual harassment claims, which President Joe Biden is expected to sign. firms compete with China also passed both chambers but still has to go to conference - the Senate version is 2,300 pages long. A bill with hundreds of billions in subsidies to help U.S. The current Congress kicked off with the American Rescue Plan Act, another 243 pages of coronavirus relief provisions, and passed a hate crimes bill in the wake of attacks aimed at Asian Americans triggered by the pandemic.Īfter that, Congress passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Thanks mostly to coronavirus-related additions, the fiscal 2021 appropriations package weighed in at 2,126 pages, more than double the prior, pre-pandemic year’s relatively skimpy combined 933 pages. Lee credits COVID-19 for keeping the government printers busy. But as lawmakers pack more and more into fewer but increasingly bigger bills, it gives an arguably clearer view of legislative productivity. Raw page numbers may seem like a crude measure, similar to other simple counts like how many hours Congress spends in session or how many votes it takes. (The 116th’s average of 24.5 was the second longest.) While the average length of enacted bills in the ’50s was just 2.3 pages, the 89 new bills enacted so far have averaged 29 pages, the longest since 1947. The 117th Congress has continued this trend toward longer, presumably more substantive bills. According to statistics from the Brookings Institution and CQ Roll Call’s own calculations, the 116th Congress was actually the most productive since the 80th in 1947–48, the farthest back Brookings’ data goes. If you look just at the number of bills enacted, Congress’ productivity has been slowing down for some time now, from passing an average of around 828 bills per two-year meeting in the 1950s to less than half that - merely 339 - in the past decade.īut if you look at a different metric, the number of pages of public laws enacted, the prevailing narrative changes. “Congress is not in gridlock,” said Frances Lee, a political science professor at Princeton University. It’s always deadlocked, gridlocked, locked in a partisan fight, each party marching in lockstep, ready to lock horns once more to block the other side from destroying America.īut what if all that’s just a story we tell ourselves to make sense of politicians’ incessant bickering and a steady stream of negative headlines? What if Congress is actually getting stuff done? We all know, for a fact, that Congress can’t get much done.
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