If you were evaluating house builders by how many houses they built, would you just take those numbers and run them through your calculator? Of course not. You’d look into house sizes, quality, and no doubt a few other factors. Or you’d be a fool.
So when the Republicans claim to be highly productive, don’t let numbers lead you around by the nose. WaPo reports:
The data shows that the House in the 115th Congress passed 321 bills. The next highest of the past five first-term Congresses was the 111th Congress (2009), when 270 bills were passed in the House.
But Tauberer offers a caveat. Counting pages, the House in 2009 tops the House this year, with 9,199 pages compared with 7,243 pages so far this year. Counting pages is an imperfect way of judging the “substance” of a bill, just as simply counting bills is. Obviously, not all bills are created equal. Few would argue that the Affordable Care Act is equal to a bill renaming a U.S. federal building.
In terms of actual bills signed into law, the 115th Congress finds itself in fourth place, with 56 bills, out of the first year of the last five presidents. By contrast, 94 bills were signed into law at this point under George H.W. Bush in 1989, 82 bills signed under Bill Clinton in 1993, and 62 bills signed in 2009 under Barack Obama.
To use a baseball analogy, bills passed in the House are like hits and bills signed into law are like runs. The House Republicans are counting hits, not the runs that win the games. Hits are an interesting statistic, but they do not matter as much as the final score.
And keep in mind the Democrats are in the minority in both chambers of Congress; their ability to interfere at the official level is limited.
In other words, this is a carefully selected statistic to put the performance of the Republican House in the best possible light. Indeed, the House Republican effort appears designed to deflect blame, to the Senate, for the mediocre legislative showing. As Ryan mentioned in the CNN town hall, the House Republican conference has set up a website, didyouknow.gop, designed to highlight all of the legislation that passed the House and awaits action in the Senate.
And, really, this is a red herring. The American polity should not judge the House or Senate on such trivia as bill count, and letting ourselves be distracted by this is a measure of our political naïveté. The performance of the two chambers should be judged on a variety of criteria, certainly not restricted to whether or not they pass bills we happen to like – or are ultimately signed by the President.
Criteria that do come to mind, beyond those bills we like, include how many of these laws are later found unconstitutional by the Judiciary? How many have unintended or unforeseen consequences? How many are so complex or full of impenetrable jargon that they can’t be understood even by specialists? Did the bodies spend all their time passing commemorative bills (i.e., trivia) in order to inflate their numbers? Hardest on both members and polity, did those substantial bills that did pass and become law have their intended affect and have a positive effect on the United States?
Government is not a math problem.
Government is the ultimate human judgment problem, and that’s where WaPo really falls down – it should have taken this opportunity to point out this fundamental error in evaluating government, still provided the breakdown and how the Republicans want you to think they did well.
And ignore the fact that they continue to trumpet how they “promised to get rid of the failing ACA,” when in reality it’s neither failing nor unpopular, and has succeeded in its stated goals of increasing the number of Americans covered by health insurance to the highest percentage ever, and decreased the expected spending on health spending.
These are the sorts of issues on which performance of the chambers of Congress should be judged, not some number that measures nothing more than a metric that is easily manipulated.
