The "Do Nothing Congress" Of 2023

Dan Rather remarks on the 2023 version of Congress -- perhaps the worst Congress this country has ever had:

Is this Congress the least productive ever? I know it has been said before, but this 118th Congress may actually be the worst one yet.

Let’s look at the hard, head-shaking facts:

• * Congress passed just 27 laws. In. One. Year. Only one congressional session has had a worse record: The 1931-32 Congress in the middle of the Great Depression passed 21 laws, but it met for only three months. 

   

• * By comparison, in 2022, Congress passed 308 laws with similarly slim majorities in both chambers.

  
  

• * Of the 27 laws passed by the 118th Congress, one approved a new commemorative coin and two renamed buildings. 

  
  

• * This works out to $3,453,304 of taxpayer money per bill. And that’s a conservative number. We considered only the salaries of the elected representatives in our calculation.

   

• * Besides failing to pass just about any bill, there are several doozies that this Congress actively shelved: 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.

  
  

• * It took 15 rounds for the House to choose a speaker, and then said speaker was ousted from the job less than 10 months later. In 234 years, neither had ever happened in the House of Representatives.

  
  

• * Then it took three weeks to elect another speaker, and the House was once again paralyzed.

  
  

• * Three House members were censured and one ousted, also a record for any Congress.

  
  

• * A Republican House member, thinking he was a 7th grader at recess, accused Kevin McCarthy, the former Speaker of the House (a fellow Republican, mind you) of elbowing him in the kidney.

  
  

• * A senator almost goaded a committee witness into a fistfight.

Is it any wonder a recent Gallup poll put Congress’s approval rating at 13%? The only surprise is that it hit double digits.