GovTrack has had a few widgets that you can embed on your website to show tracked events or the status of bills, and, for developers, now it’s possible to use the Google Maps congressional district overlays on your own Google Maps mash-ups. There’s also a REST API for searching legislation. Details here.
July 7, 2007
The most “do-nothing” of them all
Does it seem like Congress is getting less done than usual this year? Well, it’s true. Congress has enacted fewer bills in the last six months than in any first-six-months period after an election going back at least to 1993. I don’t have bill data going further back than that, so I don’t know just how “do-nothing” our Congress is. We’ve had 42 enacted bills so far this year, compared to the average of 94 for the similar time periods in the previous seven Congresses — so about half as much.
Excluding bills that designate the names of post offices and other buildings and bills that recognize birthdays and such, 25 bills were passed this year compared to the average of 71 for the seven previous comparable time periods back to 1993 — about a third as much. 40% of bills passed this year were designations/recognitions, whereas the average previously was only 23%. (Small caveat- It’s possible that a decade ago the throw-away bills weren’t post office designations and recognitions but something else I haven’t thought to filter out, so these numbers may overestimate the change.)
Now, granted, after the last major power shift in 1994, the productivity of Congress also dropped off, from 104 bills enacted at the start of 1993 to 77 at the start of 1995 (just after the Republicans took power), and then 56 two years later in 1997. But still the relevant comparison is 77 to 42, and that’s a big difference.
(As another caveat, it’s possible the drop in productivity isn’t Congress’s fault. For instance, Bush might be more reluctant to sign bills than Clinton was, or you could say that the Iraq issue reasonably needed more time than whatever was the leading issue in 1994 (I wouldn’t know, I was 12).)