Congressional Output

 Many posts have discussed the state of Congress.

Paul Kane at WP:

With fewer than 40 bills signed into law as of Monday, the House and Senate set a modern record for lowest legislative output in the first year of a new presidency, according to data maintained by C-SPAN and Purdue University.

Despite that lack of productivity, the Senate held more roll-call votes (659) than any odd-numbered year of this century, with almost 60 percent of them focused on advancing President Donald Trump’s nominations to the executive and judicial branches.

The House, meanwhile, set a 21st-century record for fewest votes cast (362) in the first session of a two-year Congress. It held barely half as many votes as in 2017, which was Trump’s first year in office and when Republicans held the majority.

Perhaps not surprisingly, an unusually large number of House members — 24 Republicans and 19 Democrats — have decided to leave the chamber either to retire or run for other office. That places the chamber on pace to set a 21st-century record for retirements in one Congress, according to C-SPAN and Purdue.

Congress did pack a lot into the One Big Beautiful Bill:

Such strategy has accelerated with each new president and his congressional majority. In 2001, George W. Bush and his GOP allies pushed through a massive tax cut on the fast-track process known as reconciliation, averting a potential filibuster in the Senate. Still, the Congress managed to send 107 other laws to the president’s desk for his signature that year.

In 2017, Republicans passed a massive tax cut through reconciliation plus sent an additional 75 pieces of legislation to Trump’s desk before Christmas.

This year’s Congress also has a massive policy bill but otherwise only about half the output of Trump’s first term. Only in 2023, with a split Congress and the Biden-Harris White House already focused on a presidential election, were fewer laws passed in the first year of a Congress, according to 32 years of data kept by C-SPAN and Purdue.

...One area in which Republicans became more productive was in eliminating federal regulations via the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress a certain amount of time to consider new regulations and, with fast-track procedures, vote to eliminate them.

The act rarely had been used since its passage in 1996, but recent Republican majorities have relied on it.

The process, of course, takes time away from legislation that could be considered on the House and Senate floors.

Reconciliation and Deliberation

In our chapter on economic policy, we describe reconciliation, the process by which Congress changes laws in order to carry out the instructions of its annual budget resolution. A reconciliation bill is not subject to a Senate filibuster, so supporters of a comprehensive health bill are considering it as a vehicle to bypass Republican opposition. As Gail Russell Chaddock of the Christian Science Monitor reports, however, the dean of the Senate does not approve of such a maneuver:

On Feb. 23, Sen. Robert Byrd (D) of West Virginia, the leading in-house defender of the Senate traditions, urged his colleagues to allow filibusters to run their course and not change rules to block them.

“The Senate is the only place in government where the rights of a numerical minority are so protected. Majorities change with elections. A minority can be right, and minority views can certainly improve legislation,” he wrote in a letter to his Senate colleagues.

“Extended deliberation and debate – when employed judiciously – protect every senator, and the interests of their constituency, and are essential to the protection of the liberties of a free people,” he added.