14 reasons why this is the worst Congress
ever
Posted by Ezra Klein on July 13,
2012 at 8:00 am
This week, the House
of Representatives voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. On its own, such a
vote would be unremarkable. Republicans control the House, they oppose
President Obama’s health reform law, and so to
they voted to get rid of it.
But here’s the punchline: This was
the 33rd time they voted to repeal the Affordable Care
Act.
Holding that vote once makes sense.
Republicans had promised that much during the 2010 campaign. But 33 times? If
doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result makes you insane,
what does doing the same thing 33 times and expecting a different result make
you?
Well, it makes you the 112th Congress.
Hating on Congress is a beloved
American tradition. Hence Mark Twain’s old joke, “Reader, suppose you were an
idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” But the
112th Congress is no ordinary congress. It’s a very
bad, no good, terrible Congress. It is, in fact, one of the very worst
congresses we have ever had. Here, I’ll prove it:
1. They’re
not passing laws.
Let’s start with the simplest
measure of congressional productivity: the number of public bills passed into
law per Congress. The best data on this comes from the annual “resume of
congressional activity,” which goes back to the 80th Congress — the same
Congress President Harry Truman dubbed the “do-nothing Congress.” But they did
a lot more than this Congress:
The 112th Congress — this
Congress — is the last bar on the right. The one that’s way smaller than
the other bars. To be fair, the 112th Congress remains in session, while the other
congresses on the chart have completed their work. But the 112th is
three-quarters done, and it’s not yet half as productive as the next
least-productive congress. Plus, Congress doesn’t typically work in last-minute
sprints; most bills are passed in the first half of a congressional session. As
such, it’s very unlikely that the 112th will manage to pull even with anyone
else on the chart.
Now you may say that this simply
reflects divided government. But while there are many instances of divided
government on that chart — the 104th Congress, for instance, when Newt
Gingrich and his Republican revolutionaries faced off against President Bill
Clinton and still managed to pass 333 public laws — there’s no session of
Congress with such a poor record of productivity.
2. They’re
hideously unpopular.
According to Gallup, the 112th Congress set a record for
unpopularity in February, when only 10 percent of Americans said they approved
of the job Congress was doing. The previous record was set in December of 2011,
when only 11 percent approved of Congress. So this Congress is number one … in
being hated by their constituents. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado made this
memorable graph of all the things that are more popular than Congress:
3. They’re
incredibly polarized.
The best measure of congressional
polarization — which is to say, the distance between the two parties
— is the DW-Nominate system developed by political scientist Keith Poole.
DW-Nominate works by measuring coalitions. It looks to see who votes
together and how often. And it works. Its results line up with both common
sense and alternative ways of measuring ideology, like the scorecard kept by
the American Conservative Union.
So what does it say about this
Congress? Well, the 112th Congress is the
most polarizedsince the end of Reconstruction:
VoteView.com
Another way of seeing the same thing
is to look Congressional Quarterly’s “Party Unity” score, which measures the
number of “in which a majority of Democrats opposed a majority of
Republicans.” In 2011 — so, in this Congress — the House set a
new record on that measure, with 75.8 percent of its roll call votes pitting
Democrats and Republicans against each other:
That’s what you get when you vote to
repeal the other party’s signature legislative achievement 33 times.
4. They’ve
set back the recovery.
In 2011, congressional Republicans
came closer than ever before to breaching the debt ceiling and setting off a
global financial crisis. In the end, they pulled back moments before we toppled
into the abyss. But by then, they had already done serious damage to the recovery.
Early in the year, the economy seemed
to be gathering momentum. In February, it added 220,000 jobs. In March, it
added 246,000 jobs. In April, 251,000 jobs. But as markets began to take the
Republican threats on the debt ceiling more seriously, the economy sputtered.
Between May and August, the nation never added more than 100,000 jobs a month.
And then, in September, the month after the debt ceiling was resolved, the
economy sped back up and added more than 200,000 jobs.
Payrolls weren’t the only evidence
that the debt ceiling fight interrupted the recovery. You can see it in
Gallup’s data on consumer confidence, too. “Confidence
began falling right around May 11, when [House Speaker John] Boehner first
announced he would not support increasing the debt limit,” observed economists
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers in a column for Bloomberg View. “It
went into freefall as the political stalemate worsened through July. … After
July 31, when the deal to break the impasse was announced, consumer confidence
stabilized and began a long, slow climb that brought it back to its starting
point almost a year later.”
Perhaps, after this near-death
experience, you would expect the leaders of the 112thCongress
to be chastened. Your naiveté is touching. Among congressional Republicans, the
debt-ceiling debacle was viewed as something of a success — and certainly
a strategy worth repeating.
“Whoever the new president is, is
probably going to be asking us to raise the debt ceiling again,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell. ”Then we will go through the process again.” Speaker of the
House John Boehner was even more direct. ”We shouldn’t dread
the debt limit. We should welcome it.”
5. They
lost our credit rating.
After the debt ceiling debacle,
Standard & Poor’s downgraded the United States’s credit rating for the
first time in the country’s history. Why? Because the 112th Congress convinced
them that they could no longer trust the American government to refrain from
crashing the global economy for no good reason. Or, as they put it, “the downgrade reflects
our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American
policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing
fiscal and economic challenges.”
6. They’re
terrible even when they’re “super.”
The supposed upside of the deal to
lift the debt ceiling led to the creation of the Special Joint Select Committee
on Deficit Reduction — better known as “the supercommittee.” The
supercommittee, which was comprised of an equal number of Democratic and
Republican lawmakers from both the House and the Senate could, with a simple
majority vote, send its recommendations to the rest of the Congress, where they
couldn’t be filibustered, amended or otherwise blocked. So that was the
carrot: Figure this out, and, in a stunning break from business-as-usual in the
sclerotic 112th, the members of the
supercommittee could get some big done.
There was also a stick: Failure
would trigger the so-called “spending sequester,” which would cut more than a
trillion dollars in dumb, blunt ways that neither party liked and that would
badly damage a slowly recovering economy.
So how did the supercommittee do?
They failed. Now the sequester is armed and members of Congress are frantically
trying – and, as of yet, failing – to find a way around it. That’s life in the
112th: Having proven incapable of solving one of the
country’s problems, they voluntarily created another problem that they also
don’t know how to solve.
7. Repeal.
Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal.
Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal.
Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal.
Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal.
Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal. Repeal.
So much repeal. So little replace.
(J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)
We’ve already covered this one, but
it bears repeating: House Republicans have now voted to repeal the Affordable
Care Act 33 times. Every time they take this vote, it’s time they could be
spending on other issues. Other issues like, for instance, what they would do
instead of the Affordable Care Act. But though they’ve found the time to vote
to repeal the Affordable Care Act on 33 separate occasions, they have voted to
replace the Affordable Care Act exactly … never.
8. The
budget shenanigans of Senate Democrats
In 2009, Senate Democrats passed a
budget. In 2010, they marked one up in the Budget Committee, but didn’t bring
it to the floor. Beginning in 2011 — so, in this Congress — they just
stopped bothering with the whole budget thing altogether.
Publicly, they argue that budget
resolutions aren’t binding, and that the 2011 Budget Control Act — the
legislation that resolved the debt ceiling standoff — has done the real
work of the budget by setting discretionary spending levels for the coming
years. Privately, they say they see no reason to vote on a budget that House
Republicans will never adopt. That’s also the reason they haven’t taken up
President Obama’s budgets. (This has led to the odd sight of Republicans
bringing Obama’s budgets to the floor so they can say Democrats voted against
them.)
Republicans argue, correctly, that
budgets, even when they don’t pass, are where you lay out your vision for the
country. Senate Democrats, in refusing to propose or vote for any budgets, are
refusing to give voters that information.
9. They
can’t get appropriations done on time.
Arguably the most basic job of
Congress is to fund the federal government — to simply keep the lights on.
That’s done through the annual appropriations process, which requires Congress
to pass 13 appropriations bills by October 1st. That hasn’t been happening
lately.
Now, to be fair to the112th
Congress, they’re not the first Congress to fail to pass the required
appropriations bills by the deadline. But as you can see on the graph below,
most congresses manage to approve at least a few of them. In fact, the average
is three. So how many appropriations bills did the 112th Congress pass by October
1, 2011? Zero.
Data: Congressional Research
Service, Graph: Ezra Klein
10. The
transportation-infrastructure fiasco.
Surface transportation bills are where
Congress deals with another of the most fundamental jobs of federal governance:
Setting aside money for roads, runways, bridges, and subways systems, and other
mainstays of our transportation infrastructure. Sen. Dick Durbin called them
“the easiest bill[s] to do on Capitol Hill.’ At least, they used to be.
In 2005, Congress passed, and
President George W. Bush signed, the Safe, Accountable, Flexible,
Efficient Transportation Equity Act. That bill expired in September 2009. But
Congress couldn’t agree on a replacement. What followed were 10 short-term
extensions of the transportation funding. “Stopgaps,” in congressional
parlance.
Finally, on June 29 of this year,
Congress passed the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act. But
rather than setting transportation policy for four or five years, as was the
previous norm, it only set it for two years. And it left most of the major problems — like how to
handle the the increasing inadequacy of the gas tax — for later.
11. The
FAA shutdown
When it came time to fund the
Federal Aviation Administration, House Republicans wanted to cut $16.5 million
in subsidies to rural airports and to rewrite the rules around unionizing
airports such that workers who didn’t vote would be counted as “no” votes.
Senate Democrats disagreed. On July 23, 2011, Congress ran out of time. That meant, in the midst
of a severely depressed economy, 4,000 FAA workers and 70,000 airport
construction workers were furloughed. The shutdown ended a few weeks earlier.
The cost to the government from uncollected airline ticket taxes alone was $350 million.
12.
Failing the Fed.
Perhaps no single institution in
Washington matters as much during an economic crisis as the Federal Reserve.
And for most of the last six years, the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors
has been missing a few members. There’s plenty of blame to go around here — including
for the Obama administration, which was slow to name nominees and didn’t
prioritize their confirmation when Democrats controlled Congress — but the
most ridiculous chapter of the story began in 2011, when Richard Shelby, the
ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, blocked the
appointment of MIT economist Peter Diamond.
As Peter Diamond found out, even a
Nobel prize in economics doesn't get you confirmed these days. (MIT)
Diamond, who would win the Nobel
prize in economics while Shelby was holding up his nomination, couldn’t have
had a better background: As an expert on labor market and pension issues, he
was ideally situated to advise the Federal Reserve on the nation’s short and
long-term problems. But Shelby wanted payback for Democrats blocking one of
George W. Bush’s nominees in 2007. The problem was he couldn’t come out and say
that. Instead, he had to say this: “I do not believe he’s ready to be a member
of the Federal Reserve Board. I do not believe that the current environment of
uncertainty would benefit from monetary policy decisions made by board members
who are learning on the job.”
Shelby’s objection was transparently
ridiculous. Previous nominees he had permitted to go through included Sarah
Bloom Raskin, who was the Maryland Commissioner of Financial Regulation;
Kevin Warsh, who had worked for George W. Bush; and Elizabeth Duke, who had
been an executive at various banks. None of them had experience making
decisions about monetary policy. Nor did any of them have a Nobel prize in
economics or a world-class understanding of labor-market frictions. But
Shelby was unrelenting, and the nomination was eventually withdrawn.
Eventually, Jeremy Stein, a Harvard economist, and Jerome Powell, an official
in George H.W. Bush’s Treasury Department, got named to the Fed, filling the
board. Neither of them have a Nobel prize in economics, either.
13.
The experts agree.
Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein are
probably the most respected scholars of Congress in Washington. For more than
40 years, they’ve been the staunchest advocates, and most respected
interpreters, of the institution, tutoring legislators from both parties and
serving on an almost endless number of commissions and projects dedicated to
understanding and improving what they call “the First Branch.” Here’s what
they say about the 112th Congress:
We have been studying Washington
politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this
dysfunctional.
14. There
actually are problems they need to solve.
If this was an age of peace,
prosperity and rapid growth — say, 1997 — perhaps the 112th
Congress’s failures would be an amusing sideshow. But this is not 1997. When
the 112th Congress was sworn in, unemployment was at 9.1 percent. Since then,
it’s fallen to 8.2 percent — and that’s been in spite of Congress’s
disastrous handling of the debt ceiling, and its inaction on jobs.
The 112th Congress has been an
embarrassment — and its members know it. As Rep. Jim Cooper, a moderate
Democrat from Tennessee who has served on and off in Congress since 1983, says,
“America’s problems have rarely looked so large, and Congress has rarely looked
so small.”
