The First Session of the 113th Congress - Mission Accomplished?

Updated December 29, 2013

With the First Session of the 113th Congress winding up for their Christmas and New Year's break, I thought it prudent to take a look at what has been accomplished thus far with data current to the end of November 2013.

Here is a calendar showing the days that the House sat during the First Session of the 113th Congress:

Here is a calendar showing the days that the Senate sat during the First Session of the 113th Congress (excluding part of December):

Now, let's see what got accomplished during the time that the House and the Senate was in session:

For the 160 days of work for the House and 151 days of work for the Senate in the First Session, the two august bodies managed to pass a total of 55 public bills into law; 14 for the Senate and 41 for the House.  While relatively little was accomplished, the Senate created 8538 pages of proceedings and the House created 7365 pages of proceedings.  That's a pile of words!  According to the Library of Congress, the Congressional Record, a more or less resume ofverbatim account of the proceedings of both Houses of Congress averages about 272 pages every day, making it the world's largest daily newspaper.  A total of 6366 measures were introduced; 1777 were bills introduced in the Senate and 3624 bills were introduced in the House.

Let's look back at the number of bills that the First Session of the 113th Congress has passed into law and compare them to the historical record since the 100th Session.  Please note that I am using data from the Resume of Congressional Activity as listed on the United States Senate website located here.  

Here is a graph showing the number of bills that have been passed into law by both the House and the Senate for each Session:

On average, since 1987, Congress has passed 230 bills in each Session.

Here is a graph that showing the number of bills that have been passed into law by the Senate for each Session:

On average, since 1987, the Senate has passed 75 bills in each Session.

Here is a graph showing the number of bills that have been passed into law by the House for each session:

On average, since 1987, the House has passed 155 bills in each Session.

As you can clearly see, if the First Session of the 113th Congress expects to get anywhere close to the average over the past twenty-five years by their last sitting day in December, they have their work cut out for them.  At only 55 bills passed thus far, this is looking like the poorest law-passing Congress in a generation.  Keeping in mind that John Boehner recently said that productivity on Capitol Hill should be measured by the number of laws repealed rather than the number of laws passed, it is interesting to note that not only has the 113th Congress passed almost no new laws, they have not repealed any either.  Just in case you wondered, here is a look at one of the laws that they did pass, H.R. 1071, which specifies the size of the precious metal blanks used in the production of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Commemorative Coins.

Don't get me wrong, more laws are most definitely not necessarily a good thing, however, it is not particularly the aim of the House and the Senate to cut down creating more laws, rather, it is the current partisan environment in Washington that is preventing them from doing so.  Perhaps this helps us to understand why American voters are increasingly becoming disillusioned with government.

The 113th Congress - mission not accomplished unless of course obfuscation and partisan politicking were the goals.