We the People: The 118th Congress has been historically unproductive. How did we get here?

In the We the People series, The Spokesman-Review examines a question from the Naturalization Test immigrants must pass to become United States citizens.

Today’s question: Who signs bills to become laws?

The president signs bills to become laws. But before a piece of legislation ever makes it into the executive office, it has to pass through both chambers of Congress – a feat that isn’t always easy.

The number of bills the president signs often depends on which parties have the majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

During the first half of Joe Biden’s presidency, when Democrats controlled both chambers, 365 bills were signed into law. Then Republicans took control of the house in the 2022 midterms.

More than halfway through its two-year term, the 118th Congress has enacted, and Biden has signed, 47 pieces of legislation. The last 10 Congresses averaged almost 390 bills enacted per term.

“It is the least productive Congress in at least 50 years in terms of the numbers of bills,” said Cornell Clayton, a political science professor at Washington State University and the director of the university’s Thomas S. Foley Institute of Public Policy and Public Service.

And an unproductive Congress means an unproductive president, at least in terms of bills signed.

But judging a Congress’ productivity solely on the number of bills passed isn’t entirely accurate, Clayton said.

“I think quantity is important, but more important than quantity is quality,” he said. Still, the 118th Congress hasn’t done well on either count.

Of the 27 bills passed in 2023, two renamed medical centers and one approved the minting of a commemorative coin.

Apart from legislation necessary to avoid a government shutdown or a default on the country’s debt, “you can’t really point to a single major piece of legislation that’s been passed out of this Congress,” Clayton said.

Biden signed a spending bill on March 24 to keep the government funded through a fiscal year that began months ago.

“Beyond keeping the lights on, this Congress has done almost nothing,” Clayton said.

Clayton contrasted the work of the 118th Congress with that of the 117th Congress.

He pointed to legislation passed under the Biden administration like the CHIPS and Science Act, aimed to increase domestic semiconductor chip production; the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested in the nation’s energy infrastructure, allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices and worked to curb inflation; and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which included billions in funding for infrastructure projects nationwide.

“These are major pieces of legislation, and in many ways, you’d have to go back to the maybe Lyndon Johnson’s administration, maybe even back to Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, to see a Congress that was more productive than the last Congress. And in comparison, this Congress, the 118th, is woefully deficient,” he said.

Clayton said Congress’ lack of productivity is a complicated issue but pointed to a few reasons for the dysfunction: slim party majorities and disunity in the Republican Party.

“When you have a closely divided Congress and the margins of control are very small, it can have a counterintuitive effect on partisanship,” he said. “I think most of us think, ‘Well, that would incentivize the majority party to be more cooperative with the minority party, and vice versa.’ You would expect to see more bipartisanship.”

Instead, parties can become more competitive in the hopes of hurting the other party’s chances in the next election.

“Because the margins are so close, both parties think that they could lose control or gain control in the next election, and so their primary incentive is not to pass legislation, especially bipartisan legislation; the primary intent becomes, ‘How can I stick it to the other party so that we can win control in the next election?’ ”

Though both chambers of Congress have slim majorities, Clayton said the problem is worse in the Republican-led House.

“House districts are more ideologically sorted and polarized because they are smaller and politically gerrymandered through the redistricting process. By contrast, senators must run in the statewide races. Thus, they tend to be less ideologically extreme,” he said.

After then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was ousted in early October, infighting in the Republican Caucus lasted nearly a month before Mike Johnson became speaker on Oct. 25.

“Much of the conflict taking place in this Congress is not between Democrats and Republicans, it’s between the Freedom Caucus and other members of the Republican Party … it’s impossible, really, to pass legislation without a functional majority,” Clayton said.

The situation likely won’t improve for the 118th Congress, and whether the 119th Congress is any different depends on the 2024 elections, Clayton said.

“The way it will change is either the current majority party in the House, the Republicans, they’ll win a big majority or they’ll lose,” he said. “Elections are the way these things change, and that’s why people should care about the election that’s coming up.”

Reporter Orion Donovan Smith contributed to this report.