Despite a majority in the evenly divided Senate resting on Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote and a slim margin in the House, the Democratic-controlled 117th Congress has produced some of the furthest-reaching legislation in years.
Whether Congress’s achievements were a positive, however, will be left to voters on Nov. 8. While the GOP needs to net only five House seats in the House to win a majority, the Senate is more of a toss-up. Still, even amid a tooth-and-nail fight for control of Congress, some of Democrats’ fiercest Republican critics concede a possible momentum shift. They point to party unity between congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden, whose approval ratings have fallen, even in the face of persistently high inflation and a host of other challenges at home and abroad.
“I’ll give the Dems this. With a 50/50 Senate & a historically unpopular president, they passed major (terrible) legislation. Lots of it. They came to do something,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) tweeted on Aug. 8, speaking for many in his party. “There’s a lesson there for the GOP. If they get back Congress, they better be willing to fight.”
The capstone for Democrats in the 117th Congress is the enactment of their Inflation Reduction Act, a massive healthcare, tax, climate, and energy spending plan that was the product of months of intraparty negotiations between centrists and left-wing lawmakers. But Congress had been busy for a while before that.
Soon after the 117th Congress was sworn in on Jan. 3, 2021, amid a still-raging COVID-19 pandemic, much of its attention became immediately preoccupied with President Donald Trump and the ensuing fallout from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The House impeached the president on Jan. 13 due to Trump’s actions (and inactions) on Jan. 6. Though Trump was acquitted in his Senate trial once out of office, the proceeding was still notable because seven Republican senators joined all Democrats in voting to convict him. Months later, the House established a Jan. 6 select committee, which in recent months has featured testimony from onetime Trump associates who have painted a less-than-flattering portrait of the outgoing president’s efforts to cling to power and overturn Biden’s 2020 win.
On the legislative front, one of the first bills the 117th Congress took up was a massive stimulus package meant to boost the still largely shutdown economy by dramatically expanding social welfare programs. With a $1.9 trillion price tag, the American Rescue Plan was the costliest spending bill enacted by Congress in half a century when measured by 10-year deficit impact. Provisions of the bill, enacted in March 2021 without any Republican support, were $1,400 stimulus checks for many, an extension of $300 weekly unemployment supplements, and a dramatic expansion of the child tax credit. A few weeks later, Congress approved and Biden signed a sweeping $953 billion expansion of the Paycheck Protection Program, the low-interest loan program designed to help keep businesses afloat amid government-mandated pandemic closures.
Congress’s approval of major spending bills wasn’t limited to pandemic-related legislation. Democrats’ signature Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, popularly known as the “bipartisan infrastructure law,” was enacted in November 2021 with some Republican support. The unprecedented $1 trillion legislation, which included about $550 billion in new spending, poured federal funds into so-called hard infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, broadband, transportation, and utilities.
Congress also authorized more than $54 billion in support for Ukraine after the country was invaded by Russia in late February, pushing through a series of aid bills with bipartisan support.
Additionally, the military saw big funding boosts in the 117th Congress. The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress’s annual must-pass defense spending bill, saw a $37 billion increase in top-line spending from 2021. And while a final version of the 2023 NDAA has not yet been agreed upon by Congress, the House and Senate both passed versions increasing the defense budget again by tens of billions of dollars.
The 117th Congress also enacted a series of bills targeting racism and promoting racial justice on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis. Democratic-led bills designating lynching a federal hate crime, establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday, and facilitating the prosecution of COVID-19-related hate crimes against Asian Americans all cleared Congress with most Republicans in support. The two parties similarly joined together to pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, banning the import of goods manufactured in China’s Xinjiang province, largely populated by the country’s persecuted Uyghur Muslim minority, and forcing businesses to disclose whether they have investments in the troubled region.
But as 2021 drew to a close, the pace of the 117th Congress seemed to slow. Citing concerns related to inflation and the ballooning national debt, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) opposed Biden’s signature $2.2 trillion Build Back Better social spending plan, effectively killing the proposal in the evenly divided Senate. Nevertheless, after half a year of relative legislative stagnation, Democrats’ fortunes seemed to reverse heading into the summer — in July, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) struck a deal with Manchin on a new $739 billion partisan spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which the Senate cleared on Aug. 7 along party lines, setting the stage for House passage and Biden’s signature.
And in the meantime, Congress notched several other milestones on long-standing Democratic priorities. The Respect for Marriage Act, which would repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and codify same-sex marriage into federal law, passed the House in July. The proposal has a good chance of making it through the Senate, where it has received some Republican support and may well secure enough to clear the chamber’s 60-vote filibuster-proof threshold.
Additionally, the Honoring our PACT Act, which aims to expand healthcare access for veterans exposed to toxins during their military service, was passed by both chambers and enacted despite a last-minute dispute over spending details. And the CHIPS and Science Act, which establishes massive subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturers in an effort to counter China, passed the House and Senate in July with mostly Democratic support and was signed into law by the president on Aug. 9.
Of course, not nearly all of Democrats’ legislative agenda made it through Congress this term. High-profile pieces of legislation, including the For the People Act (Democrats’ sweeping voting and elections bill), and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act (a policing reform bill), stalled and have no realistic chance of passing Congress. So too did bills to promote LGBT rights, abolish the federal death penalty, increase the federal minimum wage, expand abortion access, and grant statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
Still, with trillions of dollars in new spending authorized and landmark legislation markedly expanding the government’s role in the economy enacted, the 117th Congress is arguably set to have the biggest impact on the United States since the 89th Congress under President Lyndon B. Johnson. The 1965-67 congressional session is known for, among other achievements, enacting Medicare, Medicaid, and the Voting Rights Act. Unsurprisingly, this is a comparison that many Democrats have been eager to draw — as veteran Democratic consultant Bob Shrum put it in an Aug. 7 tweet, “Biden is the most legislatively successful President since LBJ.”
Nevertheless, the voters still haven’t had their say. And we won’t have to wait very long to see how voters view Congress’s newfound productivity. Nov. 8 will be a reckoning of sorts on whether voters want an expansive, far-reaching government to be the norm or an exception.
But while we wait for the people’s final verdict, it’s worth noting that history doesn’t seem to be on Democrats’ side. The last two Democratic presidents to enter office with a friendly Congress ready to enact their legislative priorities, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, saw Republicans win control of the House in a landslide midway through their first terms. And Democrats in 1994 and 2010 had far larger majorities than they do now.
