Trump frequently refers to the “do nothing” congress, and he has a point (although not necessarily the point he thinks he has). To this point in time, there have been only 78 bills passed by the 116th Congress that was sworn in in January of 2019. Ten of those, a Vox analysis notes, “have been renaming federal post offices or Veterans Affairs facilities, and many others are related to appropriations or extending programs like the National Flood Insurance Program or the 9/11 victim compensation fund.”
So, no, not a lot of legislating going on.
Granted, each Congress is delimited by a two-year period, so there is more than a year to go, but between the impeachment process and next year being an election year, I do not expect a flurry of activity.
We are on track for a historically low legislative output, even in the context of an ongoing decline in output.
The current decade is clearly the result of increased polarization in our party politics as the two parties have fully sorted themselves since the 1994 elections (the “Republican Revolution”). The 1980s, for example, was a period wherein the Democratic Party contained a huge chunk of conservative Democrats (we were still in the long era that started in the late 1870s, i.e., post-Reconstruction, wherein the Republican Party was a nonentity in the southern United States**). This made legislating easier since the majority party was even more coalitional than it currently is.
Recent output, however, is low even for divided government. Here is the breakdown that looks at legislation passed and partisan control of branches since 1981:
Here one can clearly see the decrease in legislation since the 1980s in particular (and the 1970s were even more prolific***). I would not make any normative judgement, by the way, one way or another about the value of high output. I do think that especially low output is problematic because the government does need legislative action to continue.
In terms of looking at the configuration of partisan control and its linkage output, here are some permutations for consideration:
Unified government means the same party control all three institutions. Divided government means at least one institution is controlled by the opposite party. Perfect division means that the presidency is controlled by one party and both houses of congress by the other party. Divided Congress means that each party controls one chamber each (which creates divided government also).
The divided congress configuration, which we currently have with the 116th Congress, has been the most under-productive in the post-Republican Revolution era. Indeed, the two lowest totals on the middle table above are from that configuration (296 in the 113th and 284 in the 112th). If the current Congress triples its current 78 bills passed to 234 (which is unlikely), it will be considerably lower than those.
Interesting, the least productive combination is unified government and perfect division has the highest level of output (both may be the result of the lack of need for negotiation and horsetrading in the first instance, and the opposite conditions in the second). And, the numbers are complicated by a small number of observations, especially since there are two distinct eras of policy-making to account for (pre- and post-1994 election).
Another factor in recent decades has been the increased usage of the procedural filibuster to stop legislation in the Senate.
It is worth noting that despite the fact that Trump blames Democrats for the lack of output, it is worth noting that the Democrat-controlled House has passed 328 bills that the Republican Senate has not taken up, and the Senate has passed 91 that the House has not taken up.
This is relevant given that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has clearly adopted a strategy of not legislating and, instead, focusing on judicial confirmations.
For more on this, I would recommend the Vox piece I linked in the first paragraph: House Democrats have passed nearly 400 bills. Trump and Republicans are ignoring them.
*All legislative stats used in the tables from: GovTrack’s Statistics and Historical Comparison.
**The short version to explain this for those who are not familiar: Lincoln was a Republican, and Reconstruction was driven by a Republican congress. This led to the GOP being anathema in the South. Over the course of the 20th century there was a slow erosion of this, starting mostly at the presidential level. There were a smattering of Senate elections that went GOP (an early example being John Tower in Texas in 1961 after LBJ vacated the seat to become Vice President). 1994 was a huge shift in House elections. In many cases, state level elections (such as for state legislature) did not fully flip to the GOP in the South until the 2000s.
***Based on comparable data, from 73-80 the average was 760.25.
