After the 2022 midterm elections, expectations were low about the Congress that would soon follow. Voters increased the size of the narrow Democratic majority in the Senate, but they also handed a narrow majority to far-right Republicans in the House, leaving little doubt that very little would get done.
The question wasn’t whether the 118th Congress would be awful, it was just how awful the Congress would prove to be.
Now we know: It was a cover-your-eyes debacle on a historic scale.
Around this time a year ago, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote a column with a memorable headline that read, “Worst. Congress. Ever.” As 2023 neared its end, the columnist wrote that members were wrapping up “the most ineffective session of Congress in nearly a century — and quite possibly in all of American history.”
A year later, federal lawmakers can’t exactly boast that they turned things around in the second year of the session: Legislative productivity slowed to a generational low, which was far worse than other modern Congresses that were divided between the parties.
HuffPost recently described this as the “dumbest” Congress ever and ran a striking assessment from the Brookings Institution’s Sarah Binder, whose expertise on such matters has few rivals.
So, how crazy was the 118th, historically speaking? “It’s fair to say it was one of the craziest ever,” Binder said.
To be sure, the fact that lawmakers passed such a paltry number of bills would automatically get this Congress included in a worst-ever conversation. But let’s not forget what else Capitol Hill has produced over the last couple of years:
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The first ever impeachment of a sitting Cabinet secretary without cause.
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An exceedingly rare expulsion of a disgraced member.
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The most censures against sitting House members since 1870.
Charitable observers might be inclined to argue that this Congress could’ve been even worse. That’s true. Republicans sparked a debt ceiling crisis, but they did not actually allow the United States to default on its debts and obligations. Republicans also pushed the government close to a shutdown, but thanks to Democratic votes, that didn’t happen, either.
But when assessing the merits of the last couple of years, it’s tough to celebrate these as silver linings. Parents with unruly children generally aren’t in a position to argue, “We successfully prevented the kids from setting our home on fire, so obviously we should be in contention for Parents of the Year awards.”
By any objective measure, the current Congress, which technically ends in a few days, was an embarrassment to itself. Thanks almost entirely to radical Republican tactics and refusals to compromise, this Congress was a chaotic and dysfunctional mess, which even GOP members conceded failed to do much of anything meaningful.
So long, 118th Congress. We knew you all too well.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
