House dysfunction in numbers: 724 votes, only 22 bills passed

Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker, put a positive spin on the five days and 15 record-breaking votes it took him to win the gavel in January. “Because it took so long,” he said after the ordeal, “we have now learned how to govern.”

But as the first year of the 118th Congress comes to a close, the numbers tell a different story — one that doesn’t have much to do with governance at all.

In 2023, the Republican-led House passed only 22 bills, despite a total of 724 votes.

That means more votes and less legislation than at any time in the past decade, according to an analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, and a far less productive record than last year, when Democrats had joint control of Congress. According to the clerk, the House had 549 votes in 2022 and 248 bills were passed and signed into law. data held by the Library of Congressincluding a bipartisan infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the first bipartisan gun safety bill in decades.

This year’s list of achievements is less ambitious and more of a bare minimum, such as legislation to suspend the debt ceiling and set federal spending limits that have helped the country pull back from the brink of economic catastrophe. The count also includes two temporary spending measures to prevent government shutdowns. The House passed the annual military policy bill last week before leaving this year, although it is not known when President Biden will sign it into law.

The numbers reflect the challenges Republicans have faced all year and are likely to continue, and perhaps worsen, in 2024: a slim majority that needs near unanimity to get anything done; deep party differences that make unanimity virtually impossible; and a right wing whose priority is reining in the government, not passing new laws to expand its reach.

The raw number of bills passed is not always the best way to determine the productivity of a congress, because some general bills contain dozens of smaller, sometimes very important bills that piggyback. But this year has been wildly unproductive, even given the lower standards of what is possible in a divided government and considering the reality that not all bills are created equal. For example, in 2013, when Republicans controlled the House and Democrats controlled the Senate, as now, the House passed 72 bills that were signed into law.

Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said Congress’s productivity problems have reached a “rock bottom” this year. She attributed this to deepening political polarization and the fractured Republican conference in the House of Representatives, with too small a majority to govern.

“Democrats as a party are much more interested in government doing things,” Ms. Reynolds said. “Many of the Republicans are motivated by the pursuit of ideological purity. The ideological difference surrounding the role of government makes it harder to imagine the issues on which the Republican House, especially with its divisions, would come together with a Democratic-led Senate and a Democratic president.”

Despite the low number of bills signed into law, the House saw real activity in the chamber. That included numerous votes for numerous speaker candidates (19 in two historic speaker elections), multiple attempts to expel Representative George Santos of New York from Congress (three), failed and successful votes on censuring Democratic lawmakers (six), and dozens votes about loud votes. -proper amendments to appropriations bills that ultimately failed to pass or failed to advance in the Senate because they were loaded with conservative policy priorities.

The discrepancy between the number of votes cast and the number of laws passed is something that far-right Republicans in the House of Representatives could consider a victory. One of the demands the group made of Mr McCarthy in January when they withheld their support to make him chairman was to open up the legislative process and allow more votes in the chamber.

And some of the voting occurred because members of the House of Representatives defied the speaker and pushed them against his wishes, such as a resolution to impeach Mr. Biden over his border policies and an effort to unseat Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California and fine him $16 million.

“It’s a good reminder that not every vote pursues actual legislative product,” Ms. Reynolds said.

Some Republican lawmakers have expressed frustration over their inability to get things done. “If we don’t change the fundamental problems within our conference, it’s just going to be the same stupid clown car with a different driver,” Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota told reporters in October after Mr. McCarthy’s ouster.

But those fundamental problems remain.

Insurgent right-wing Republicans, angry at Speaker Mike Johnson for trusting Democrats to pass legislation to prevent a government shutdown, voted to prevent two major spending bills from coming to the floor.

That marked the fourth time this year that House Republicans violated a long-standing code of party discipline by refusing to support procedural measures proposed by their own leaders that needed to be passed to bring legislation to the table. That didn’t happen once under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led the House for a total of eight years, or under the previous two Republican speakers, Paul D. Ryan or John A. Boehner.

However, when it came to the politics of retaliation and revenge, the House of Representatives had a historically productive year. Sometimes it took several attempts, but Republicans eventually succeeded in formally censuring three Democratic members of the House of Representatives: Mr. Schiff and Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Minnesota and Jamaal Bowman of New York.

Before this year, only two members had been convicted in nearly four decades.

“I suspect this has something to do with the collapse of party leadership on the Republican side,” said Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University. “There is no obstacle for members to speak.”

It took the House of Representatives three tries, but it also made history when it voted to expel Santos. This made him the first person to be expelled from the House of Representatives without first being convicted of a federal crime or supporting the Confederacy.

Republican leaders tried to portray the year as productive in their own way.

In his year-end summary, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the majority leader, said Republicans succeeded in passing legislation to “confront rising crime, unleash American energy, lower costs for families, open the wide-open border of President Biden, transcends executive power and burdensome agency regulations, and refocuses our military on its core mission: national security.”

But many of those bills amounted to political messaging tools that would have no chance in a Democratic-controlled Senate.

Aside from the bills that need to be passed, the bills that did make it into law concern the smallest of small-bore issues, such as the 250th anniversary of the United States Marine Corps Commemorative Coin Act and a bill to establish the clinic of designate the Department of Veterans. Business in Gallup, NM, as the Hiroshi “Hershey” Miyamura VA Clinic.

In his farewell speech to Congress, Mr. McCarthy highlighted as one of his major achievements of the year a successful effort to prevent a new law. The measure blocked a rewrite of the criminal code for the District of Columbia that would have lowered mandatory minimum sentences for some violent crimes and increased them for others.

“The president threatened to veto it,” Mr. McCarthy said, “but we did it anyway, and we stopped him and it became law.”