It only takes one bill to wallop a nation. Remember that.
There’s an emerging line of attack from Washington Democrats to criticize Congress’ lack of ‘productivity’ and quality: the amount of legislation that has become law. The president is on track to have signed 58 bills into law in the year 2013 — 58 of the more than 6,300 introduced in this session of Congress.
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) used this number to say that the current Congress is the “least productive in many respects in history.” Rep. Rick Nolan, a Minnesota Democrat who was around D.C. in the 1970s, said that “it’s embarrassing.” So much so that the “Do Nothing Congress” of 1947 — which had 395 measures become public law by year’s end — looks like the Do Everything Congress by comparison.
Headlines are labeling this 58-bill figure of the 2013 Congress a “dubious distinction,” “underachieving,” and “sluggish.” The conventional wisdom likes to imagine Congress’ legislative activity as a hamster running the wheel: Get a bunch of stuff signed by the president and it’s a sign that the legislature has been doing the people’s work. Don’t, and it’s a sign of failure. The numbers do the talking.
They shouldn’t. The text of the bills should.
Consider a couple that have become law in this era of divided government and increasing partisanship, albeit not this Congress: one a piece of budgetary nonsense, and the other the gruesome remake of our health care system.
The Budget Control Act of 2011 was the desperate effort to reduce spending and end the debt ceiling standoff that produced the D.C. jargon and junk “sequester.” It was the product of a never-before-seen crisis that asked two fractured groups to do one impossible thing: agree to a specific level of spending cuts by a specific, near-term date, or the “sequester” will do it for you — and it won’t be pretty. Of course Republicans and Democrats failed to reach agreement, and of course the sequester kicked in, threatening defense programs and domestic programs alike. It was an indiscriminate “meat-ax” approach to slashing federal spending, cutting dollars regardless of merit.
Think of it as trying to lose weight by chopping off a limb. It was and remains a stupid idea.
But not nearly as stupid as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as The Law That Cancels Your Insurance And Asks You To Buy More Expensive Insurance Via A Website That Doesn’t Work. (TLTCYIAAYTBMEIVAWTDW is a cumbersome acronym even for Washington standards.) This 2,000-page gem had all the bipartisan interest of a Netroots Nation conference, and its effects on the public have ranged from frustration with technology to anger over policy cancellations and costlier premiums. You could imagine a Healthcare.gov user as being the angry stick-figure person at the keyboard; you could imagine a family encountering the law’s financial impact as your neighbors.
The Budget Control Act. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Two bills.
It doesn’t take much to be terrible.
Nor is an abundance of newly-made public law an indication of success — after all, one of Congress’ great achievements in quantity is its ability to rename post offices by the bundle. So maybe it’s time we start judging by quality, instead.
The country does not necessarily need a more ‘active’ Congress, in terms of laws made; it needs a smarter Congress, a more capable Congress. It needs a Congress that can enact well-crafted, long-term solutions to fiscal ills, and one that can sweep up the leftovers of 2013, such as farm policy.
That would also take a White House occupant whose interest in building relationships on Capitol Hill is warmer than icy cool. And with the current Congress — whose composition, no matter the internal battles of either party, is divided by a canyon and connected by a creaky bridge — the effort is all the more difficult.
But regardless of their collective fate, it’s wrong to judge them by meaningless numbers.
Because it only takes one bill to wallop a nation. Remember that.
