The least productive Congress in history could be the current one, based on its slow rate of passing laws.
This Congress has passed only 52 public laws since it came into session in January, legislative statistics show.
Taking away ceremonial measures such as naming a bridge after a baseball legend, the number goes down to 44, reported NBC. The remaining are referred to as “substantive” laws.
While that’s below the average per year since 1999 of 70, it’s not the worst.
That would be the Congress in 2011-2012 (the 112th Congress), which has been called the least productive Congress since 1948, when statistics began being kept. That Congress passed 41 “substantive” laws by this time during the first year.
Each Congress is two years. The current one is the 113th Congress.
Overall, the 112th Congress passed 75 ceremonial laws and 208 substantive laws for a total of 283, according to the Pew Research Center. The second-least productive Congress to date is the 104th Congress (1995-1996), which passed 333, reported the Huffington Post.
While the current Congress is slightly ahead of the last one, it’s not looking good, analysts say.
“The major urgent areas of concern in the country just have not been addressed,” says Norm Ornstein, a congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s pretty pathetic.”
Sarah Binder, an expert on legislative politics at the Brookings Institute, says that the Democrats controlling the White House and Senate and the Republicans controlling the House is a factor, but there are other ones as well, such as disputes between members of the same party, and a decreasing number of moderates.
“Consensus is simply much harder to build if there’s nobody coming to the table,” she said.
