‘Do-nothing’ GOP House got a few things done

Democratic President Harry Truman popularized the term “do-nothing Congress” and rode that taunt to an unexpected victory in 1948.

Truman, a vice president who rose to commander in chief after President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1945, didn’t simply beat his Republican opponent, New York Gov. Thomas Dewey, that year. His party also came roaring back to control Congress . Democrats took 75 seats in the House that year and nine Senate seats, regaining majorities in both chambers and ending their sojourn in the political wilderness after Republicans had won joint control of Congress in the 1946 midterm elections.

It has been a popular trope of Democratic presidential candidates and their proxies and partisans ever since to complain about a “do-nothing” or “obstructionist” Congress when Republicans are in charge.

“You have a do-nothing Republican Congress that has delivered no meaningful progress for the American people,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) complained on MSNBC in March, when President Joe Biden was still his party’s standard-bearer.

“Instead, it's been chaos and dysfunction and extremism,” he said. “And that compares to the track record of accomplishment under the leadership of President Biden, a historic Congress in the previous two years prior to this Congress starting, where we got things done.”

Jeffries’s “chaos and dysfunction” criticism referred to the long struggle by House Republicans to fill the speaker of the House position. It took 15 ballots for former Rep. Kevin McCarthy to become speaker on Jan. 7 of last year, only to be ousted nine months later. It then took House Republicans three weeks and multiple rejected candidates to settle on Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) as the new speaker.

Some Republicans and their supporters have turned the “do-nothing” criticism into a bit of rhetorical judo. For instance, the Border Patrol union, which would go on to endorse former President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, went after Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, for her involvement with border issues as part of the Biden administration.

“If you were given a job two years ago with the explicit goal of reducing illegal immigration, and then you sit around and do nothing while illegal immigration explodes to levels never seen before, you should be fired and replaced. Period,” the union posted.

For “do-nothing” charges to stick, there usually has to be at least a grain of truth to them. This is complicated in the 118th Congress by the fact that Republicans only controlled one chamber and that by a razor-thin margin.

Before she was her party’s nominee for president, Harris was able to cast the most tiebreaking votes of any vice president in U.S. history, 33, in only three years. Her tiebreaking function was what gave her party a working majority in the Senate.

Contrariwise, the House had a slim GOP majority that whittled down over time. At publication time, there were 220 Republicans, 212 Democrats, and three vacancies due to deaths and a resignation, according to the U.S. House of Representatives Press Gallery.

American parties are coalitions with different factions. When they control one house of a legislature, this typically means parties need more than a bare, shaven majority to pass all but the most uncontroversial legislation to deal with dissenting votes. When there is little to no cushion, it becomes much harder for majority parties to move bills.

Some observers charged that even factoring in the narrow divide, this was an especially unproductive Congress.

“Congress just wrapped up its least productive year since the Great Depression, passing just 27 bills that were signed into law,” the cable website Spectrum News reported at the end of last year. “Of those 27, one law created a commemorative coin and two renamed medical centers.”

In a “legislative report” put out around the same time, the Amalgamated Transit Union charged that the House, like Seinfeld, had given the public a show about “nothing.”

The Nation’s D.C. Bureau Chief Chris Lehmann rang in the new year by charging the House’s “chief nihilist lawmakers” with giving people “performative MAGA stunts” instead of legislation.

House Republican leaders could get away with that, Lehmann explained, because they “hail from safely gerrymandered deep-red districts, where they face no penalty at the polls for their fundamental refusal to do the jobs they were elected to do.”

However, according to the numbers, some of that criticism turned out to be arguably misleading and premature.

The 118th Congress has passed 78 pieces of legislation so far, according to the GovTrack website. That total grows considerably higher, 270, when we consider bills passed “via incorporation,” or as sections bundled into larger bills.

The number of 270 passed and a passage rate of 2% is historically low, but not crazily so. In fact, according to GovTrack’s data, which go back to the 93rd Congress of 1973, the last three Congresses, with over 1,000 incorporated bills per Congress passed, look like ambitious outliers. The number of proposed bills has also ballooned over the last several Congresses to over 17,000, which skews the passage rate.

A typical Congress will see somewhere between 400 and 800 incorporated bills passed in two years. By that standard, 270 is on the low side, but there’s still the lame duck to come.

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When it came down to it, many pieces of substantial legislation did make it through both the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate this year. These included such big-ticket or controversial items as the transportation authorization bill, FISA reauthorization, legislation to force the sale or domestic closure of TikTok, and funding for proxy wars in Israel and Ukraine.

True, there was considerable drama from Republican-led oversight hearings and attempts at impeachment of Biden and various Cabinet officials. But through it all, the wheels of the government kept turning. An allegedly “do-nothing” House didn’t manage to shut the government down for a single day.

Jeremy Lott is the author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.