You were right if you thought this seemed like the do-nothingest congressional session in U.S. history. With just 22 bills passed this year into law, House Republicans are barely ahead of the 1931 record of 21, a congress didn't even sit until December.
Rachel Maddow noted this phenomenon earlier in the week. And Dana Milbank said just that in his column yesterday, calling it "do-nothingest congressional session in U.S. history."
So why is it like this? Well, Democrats control the Senate so that's a problem. And Joe Biden is in the White House, so that's another potential problem. With those impediments, instituting their crackpot ideas is much more problematic. And since doing something moderate, to the political center is out of the question, they're choosing to do nothing, concentrating instead on the presidential election in 2024 when they hope to go back to giving billionaires massive tax cuts they don't need, as they did during the Trump years. That's what the Hunter Biden stuff is really all about, as is their present asinine impeachment effort. The politics of distraction, in other words.
Since enough of the American public still sees fit to elect these do-nothing jackasses, we're basically in a holding pattern until next November. Nothing will get done because Republicans want nothing to get done.
Source: Washington Post
“This will go down as ... the least productive Congress since the Great Depression,” Rep. Joe Neguse, Democrat of Colorado, observed this week as the Rules Committee marked up plans for an impeachment inquiry into President Biden for imaginary crimes.
Neguse almost certainly understates the case. While it’s true, as HuffPost’s Jonathan Nicholson pointed out, that Congress got even less done in 1931, this is only because it didn’t start its session that year until December. It seems probable that no Congress in American history has spent so much time accomplishing so little as this one.
Milbank summed it up this way:
On Thursday, the House, exhausted from its labors, recessed for a three-week vacation, leaving behind a pile of urgent, unfinished business, including funds to arm Ukraine and fortify the southern border. When the lawmakers return, they will have just eight legislative days to pass something to avoid the latest government shutdown — on which they have made no progress so far. But before rushing home for the holidays, Republicans did manage to approve, in a party-line vote, a formal impeachment inquiry into Biden for imaginary crimes that even they could not identify.
Detailing the many farcical elements, Milbank ended on this note:
Democrat Eric Swalwell (Calif.) congratulated Republicans for their dogged pursuit of the president’s son. “I want to give James Comer some credit,” he told the House, “because after 50,000 pages of depositions and secret hearings and closed hearings, I think if we give him enough time, he is going to prove that Hunter Biden is Joe Biden’s son.”
After the do-nothingest congressional session in U.S. history, that might go down as their most notable achievement.
Quite.
