The 116th Congress sent 353 bills to President Donald Trump’s desk, according to the Library of Congress’ site.
Of the 24 Congresses we analyzed, only four passed fewer laws than the 116th – three of them within the past decade.
3, 2019).ĭespite its late burst of activity, the 116th was overall one of the least legislatively productive Congresses of the past five decades. In most cases we refer to each Congress using the two calendar years that make up the bulk of the time each Congress is in session, though a Congress formally ends in the subsequent odd-numbered year (for example, the 115th Congress of 2017-18 concluded on Jan. For each Congress, we reviewed the text of each law passed to sort it into the appropriate category. ceremonial laws begins with the 101st Congress (1989-90). Our more detailed look at substantive vs. goes back to the 93rd Congress (1973-74), so that’s where our analysis of lame-duck sessions starts. However, that practice was largely abandoned in the mid-1990s.)Īs our source for laws enacted, we’ve relied on, an online repository of legislative data and information maintained by the Library of Congress. (In earlier years Congress also designated dozens of special days, weeks and months in honor of various causes, such as National Next Door Neighbor Day, Nicolaus Copernicus Week and National Arthritis Month. In general, substantive laws are those that have some real-world impact, no matter how small – be it spending federal dollars, setting policy, adjusting the boundaries of a national park or merely correcting a typographical error in an earlier law.Ĭeremonial laws are those intended primarily to honor or recognize an individual, group or cause – for example, naming or renaming post offices, courthouses and other federal facilities, authorizing commemorative coins or congressional gold medals, or authorizing outside groups to erect memorials on federal land. We also distinguish between substantive and ceremonial laws. We’ve chosen a fairly straightforward approach: how many laws (public laws in most cases, as opposed to private laws that apply to single individuals) each Congress actually enacted. Laws aren’t widgets, of course, and legislative productivity can be measured in many different ways – by counting the number of pages in the statute book, how many votes were taken, comparing bills introduced with bills enacted, and so on. This post is the latest in a series, starting in 2014, examining the productivity of Congress. Among the bills enacted during the recent lame-duck session was a $900 billion economic relief bill that had been the subject of a congressional standoff for months leading up to Election Day. That’s the highest share of lame-duck legislation since at least the 93rd Congress of 1973-74, the first years of our analysis. More than four-in-ten bills that became law out of the 116th Congress (151 of 344, or 44%) were passed in the final two months of its two-year term. But none in the nearly five decades for which data is available has been as legislatively productive as the lame-duck session of the 116th Congress, which wrapped up on Jan. Lame-duck sessions historically were used to wrap up pending business, and more recently to cut last-minute budget deals. The unflattering descriptor alludes to the senators and representatives who have lost reelection or whose terms are almost up but can still help make laws for a few more weeks. Post-general election meetings of Congress, which have become routine in recent decades, are commonly known as “lame-duck” sessions.
0 kommentar(er)
