Martin Falbisoner (Wikipedia Commons)

The Polarized “Do Nothing Congress”

James L. T.
Aug 31, 2018 · 5 min read

On October 7th, 1948, President Harry Truman referred to the 80th Congress as the “Do Nothing Congress.” To some extent, Truman was frustrated by the fact that Democrats had lost significantly in the election cycle that brought with it a new Republican authority in the legislature.

In December 2013, Lauren Fox wrote in US News that by the end of the year Congress had only passed 52 bills. Shortly thereafter, In April 2014, Chris Cilizza would write in the Washington Post that “…the 113th Congress will be the least productive in history.”

In this respect, to call Congress “do nothing” is more a reaction, than an objective marker. Here’s why.

First of all, the first session of any congress tends to be the least productive of the two years. Second, legislation tends to get introduced, debated, voted on, and passed in the later part of each year, but by the end of the first session only about a third of laws that will be enacted will have been passed. GovTrack illustrates this in a graph I’ve appropriated below:

GovTrack

Both Fox, and Cilizza were wrong. In Fox’s defense, 20 more laws were passed, and to Cilizza’s discredit, he was speaking from a place of partisanship, much like Truman, before the brunt of legislation would be passed. Due to these circumstances, the 113th Congress turned out to be only slightly better than the 112th, which as it turns out, currently is the least productive.

Having compiled data using resumes on congressional activity, we can see that the number of introduced legislation since 1947 has remained stable (Figure A).

Figure A

While the number of laws introduced has remained stable over time, the number of bills enacted has been declining since the 84th Congress (Figure B).

Figure B

A bit more striking however is that the fraction of bills enacted to those introduced has gone through spikes and dips, but has primarily been decreasing since the 100th Congress (Figure C).

Figure C

To put all of this in perspective, the first session of the 80th Congress (the original “Do Nothing Congress”) introduced 6,755 bills, of which 395 were enacted into laws within 143 “in session” days. In contrast to that, the first session of the 115th Congress (2018) spent 195 days (30% more time) to introduce 6,989 (3.4% more) bills, and saw 100 enacted (75 % fewer). The first session of the 80th Congress boasted a 5.8% success rate (ratio of laws enacted to those introduced), whereas the first session of the 115th saw only a 1.4% success rate.

If we’re to look at Figure C, we could assume that we’re on track to reverse the course and begin seeing an increased success rate of passed laws. But I disagree. I disagree because Congressional polarization is at a point similar to where it was directly following the Civil War. While I don’t believe that this means that we’re on the precipice of a civil war, I do believe that polarization is a real problem.

Using Voteview (DW-NOMINATE) data, and only focusing on the Senate, below are two images, and a gif. The first image is the Senate dimensions for the 80th Congress. The second image is the 115th Congress, and the gif shows the change for all sessions between the 80th and 115th.

80th Senate (Voteview)
115th Senate (Voteview)
80th Senate to 115th Senate (gif created by me)

The House of Representatives is in similarly poor shape:

80th House of Representatives (Voteview)
115th House of Representatives (Voteview)

What we see in both chambers of Congress are two nearly homogeneous groups that are more less ideologically diverse. Ideological diversity within big tent politics functions as the bedrock of bipartisanship. The 115th House and Senate is what tribalism looks like as data points. The distance between these two camps should not be measured by the distance between the most liberal and most conservative, but rather the most conservative Democrat and the liberal Republican. Looking at the 115th House, we see that the distance between these two is significantly wider than it was during the 80th Congress. That white space in the 115th between the blue and red dots is a grand canyon that seems impossible to overcome due to the lack of moderates within both chambers.

We could refer to Congress as “do nothing” — and there are fair criticisms against measuring the productivity of Congress on the basis of legislation passed. We should consider, however, that the failure of Congress to adequately address the needs of the populace is what leads to fragmented democratic institutions that lead to civil wars, revolutions, and in other circumstances fascism taking its roots.

I argue that we should be concerned, and that seeing how similarly defined both camps are in Congress should raise alarms. Fair arguments against this argument is the fact that polarization has ebbed and flowed — which is true. We saw similar trends in the 1860’s, and 1910’s, and parties shape and reshape all the time. So one fair argument against my caution would be that we’re observing a reset and that this is the natural flow of political parties.

Whatever the case may be with respect to ever changing political landscapes, we cannot escape the very real present reality that Congress is more polarized than it was in the 1940’s, 1980’s, and early 2000’s. Nor can we ignore the dangers that arise from tribal like politics that enforces compliance over compromise for the sake of uniformity.

To this end, we’re not experiencing a “do nothing congress” as much as we’re experiencing a “congress that cannot work together.”

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James L. T.

Written by

Mental health counselor by day, political blogger by night. #cat person, #liberal. Twitter: @AntiphonSophist

Be Sad With Me

A place where you may share in the commiseration of modern American politics.

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