When President Harry Truman ran for re-election in 1948, he railed against a “do-nothing” 80th Congress that passed 906 separate bills into law over a two-year period, including the landmark Taft-Hartley union regulation law and the 1947 National Security Act that created the modern U.S. military establishment.
More than 75 years later, Truman would have a much easier time making the same argument against the 119th Congress.
During President Donald Trump’s whirlwind first year back in office, the Republican-led House and Senate has largely sat idle as the 47th president has usurped authorities once considered the exclusive domain of the legislature while doing just over 4 percent of the work done by their historically-maligned predecessors, sending a paltry 38 bills to the president’s desk to be signed into law.
That has left many of Trump’s landmark changes to come from executive orders, as he centralizes government power in the White House and away from Capitol Hill.
Most of those laws passed by Congress have been so-called “disapproval” resolutions that rolled back regulations enacted during the previous administration but did not enact new policies.
One, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, was brought to the House floor by a rarely-used discharge petition process over House Speaker Mike Johnson’s objections, and eventually signed into law by Trump only after the Senate passed it by unanimous consent.
Some bills have honored certain groups, such as a pair of laws enacted earlier this month that raised the pension awarded to Medal of Honor recipients and authorized the U.S. Mint to award Congressional Gold Medals to the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” U.S. Olympic ice hockey team.
Others were must-pass bills such as the annual National Defense Authorization Act or so-called “continuing resolutions” to fund the government at last year’s spending levels because Congress hasn’t passed regular spending bills this year.
And a few were stand-alone bills representing priorities of Trump or his allies, such as the Laken Riley Act (requiring non-citizens who are charged with certain crimes to be held without bond) or the Take It Down Act (requiring online platforms to remove nonconsensual intimate images) supported by First Lady Melania Trump.
Data maintained by C-SPAN and Purdue University showed the House casting just 362 roll-call votes this year — the lowest number of votes in a first year of a Congress this century, and around half of their output from 2017, Trump’s first year in office during his first term.
The Senate was slightly more active, with 659 roll-call votes this year, more than any Senate during an odd-numbered year this century. But the vast majority of those were votes on nominees to federal agencies and the judiciary.
With days to go until Americans are hit by sky-high health insurance premiums because Congress did not extend Covid-era subsidies for Affordable Care Act marketplaces, Congress has still not offered up a solution to that looming problem.
Ohio Republican David Joyce lamented the failure to address that problem when asked to evaluate the 119th Congress’ record by The Washington Post.
“We dropped the ball miserably by not doing something on health care all year long, knowing that the subsidy issue was going to be here at the end of the year,” Joyce said. “We didn’t do a damn thing about it.”
Joyce noted that Congress managed to pass Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill tax and spending package which contained many Trump-endorsed priorities but was limited by Senate rules governing the party-line process that allowed the upper chamber to consider the bill without a 60-vote filibuster in the way.
That followed a pattern first started in 2001, when the GOP-led Congress under then-president George W. Bush passed a massive tax cut bill that blew up a budget surplus left by the outgoing Clinton administration.
“I guess we got the big, beautiful bill done,” he said.
“Other than that, I really can’t point to much that we got accomplished.”
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