Do-Nothing: Modern Congressional Productivity At An All-Time Low

Photo courtesy of Lloyd Bishop and NBC

On April 5, 2023, while sitting on the couch with Seth Meyers, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the prominent House representative of New York's 14th congressional district, stated: "I believe this is the least productive first three months under almost any Speaker, potentially in the history of the United States, if not in modern political history."

While Ocasio-Cortez's statement may feel accurate, examining the factors contributing to this perception is essential. The media does not focus on legislative progress in the House or Senate, which can create a sense of stagnation. Additionally, many people feel that the government is ineffective overall.

"I wouldn't say we're in a good place right now," said Sharon McMahon, a Jefferson Award-winning educator known as 'America's Government Teacher,' "And there's a, you know, a variety of explanations for that. But I think one of the biggest challenges that America is facing right now is this idea that associating with somebody who has different political beliefs from you is morally irresponsible and that you take on the beliefs you know, you sort of absorb the beliefs by association when you associate with somebody who believes differently than you do."

Indeed, political parties are running many campaigns on a broader level. Instead of focusing on individual qualities, it's about what would happen if one party had control over another. This change is fatal in a system that relies on cooperation and compromise.

"People's feelings have been, gotten much more negative over time. Again, people are much more likely to think in consistently ideological terms," said Todd Washburn, a professor at the Harvard Extension School.

Historical Congressional data, as far back as 1951, paints a stark picture running parallel to history as to how unproductive Congress has become. Congress has experienced a severe drop in productivity, as it spends more time in session while passing minimal bills into law.

In particular, when evaluating the productivity of Congress under the first three months of new Speakers since 1951, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has, statistically, scored the lowest of any new Speaker, with only 0.03% of bills passed into law while Congress has spent every calendar day in session.

This drop is, in fact, no coincidence when considering American history.

Between the 1930s and 1950s, the Democratic Party firmly controlled America. However, a push toward Civil Rights would change that dramatically.

"National Democrats made the calculation that to hold their very strange political coalition together, which included a lot of northern liberals, but also included the forces of white supremacy in the South, that they had to keep race off the political agenda. And there was a concerted effort to keep race off the agenda," said Paul Pierson, a political historian at the University of California, Berkeley.

With the Democrats becoming the party of Civil Rights, the Republicans decided they needed to lean into the voters disenfranchised by the Democrats' transformation. Former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, often regarded as the first true hardline Republican conservative, heavily attracted this base.

"The basic idea being that Republicans recognized what was starting to happen and decided, and you could say Goldwater actually started this process, but it accelerated, I would say, under, under Richard Nixon. They recognized what was happening and they decided to lean into it, that, that is that they could become the majority party," said Pierson.

The Nixon campaign's implementation of the Southern Strategy in 1968, which leaned heavily into anti-integrationist rhetoric, got Nixon elected. Additionally, it reinforced a divide over crucial issues and began a downturn in Congressional productivity that never truly recovered.

"The Southern Strategy basically involved leaning into that, emphasizing the kinds of issues often coded in a way so that the racial valence of them was not too visible," Pierson said.

John Ehrlichman, the White House Counsel and Domestic Affairs advisor under Nixon admitted as such to reporter Dan Baum in 1994, stating: "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Congressional productivity would continue to decline, ebbing and flowing but never reaching the peaks it had once achieved. The usage of social media, too, as a campaigning tool, created an even more significant distraction for members of Congress.

"Most of them, especially at the congressional level, use it to create viral burns," said McMahon, "You know, sort of like, 'I'm going to, I'm going to say something that is really controversial. It's going to get a ton of eyeballs on it because that moment is going to go viral. And I am then, as a result, going to fill my coffers with donations from people who like what I have to say.' So, they are very disincentivized from crossing that political divide and entirely incentivized to stay on their own side, and, in fact, to create those viral moments that they know will help them raise money."