Dysfunctional Congress Sets New Record Low In Productivity

If it feels like Congress is doing less work than ever, it’s not your imagination. Last year, Congress passed fewer bills than ever before, and one of the main reasons is the refusal of the two parties to actually work together. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.Show more

Link - https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-CONGRESS/PRODUCTIVITY/egpbabmkwvq/

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

If it feels like Congress is doing nothing, it's because they are. There's no imagination here. They're doing nothing. Last year, Congress passed fewer bills than ever before, and one of the main reasons is the refusal of the two parties to work together. It is the most divided politics in American history, and this Congress is doing less in American history than have ever been done. I've got Farron Cousins to talk about this with me. Farron, what do you think?
This is not surprising at all. I mean, look, we were at the point where in a span of 10 months, we almost had five government shutdowns because Congress was so incompetent and so incapable of working with each other that they couldn't even pass just regular, let's keep working budget bills. So, because, you can't even get past a budget, let alone try to work on something like another infrastructure package or revamping healthcare or literally anything, because they can't even do the basic, fundamental job that they have of passing a budget every year.
Yeah. Did you just say in less than six months, it's happened eight times?
Well, it was 10 months, five times.
Okay. 10 months, five times, either way.
So every other month we're on the verge of a shutdown.
That is way crazy. So they were successful in passing a record level, low level, dysfunctional, disgusting, low level of 27 bills. It's the lowest in American history, right?
Yeah. Usually every year Congress will pass hundreds of pieces of legislation, or at least they had in the past. And some of those are minor. They're let's pass a quick resolution to do this. Let's do a quick resolution naming this day, you know, Mike Papantonio day. But we can't even do that anymore. 27 pieces of legislation and when you're looking at a group of people that only work about 150 days a year, it's insane how little is getting done. And like you said, it's getting worse. We've done even less this year than we had by this point last year. And it is, you've got political scientists looking at this, you've got historians looking at it, and they've all kind of come to the conclusion, the number one factor is these people hate each other so much they won't even talk to each other anymore.
Actually, what's so amazing about it is most of these folks don't have to work. We've got a congress that has, as far as people who had to work for a living, labor people, what, we did a story on this couple of weeks ago, was it 3% or 8%? Something like that.
It's insane. It's in the single digits.
Single digits of people that actually had to work for a living. So these people, our Congress that we have, well, they might not have started out like that, but they're multimillionaires because of insider trading, because of all the scams they're running. I mean, these are stories we've done. I'm not just saying this, we've done several stories about the insider trading. How somebody has started off and they got a hundred thousand dollars in the bank and within years, within a couple years, they've got $10 million in the bank. So they don't have to work. So what they do is, what is it, they go home on Thursdays, right?
Usually, yes.
Tell us, in other words, no matter what's pending, they're gonna go home on Thursdays and come back Monday, supposedly. Right?
Right. Congress is technically in session three days a week. Okay. Seven day week, Congress has to be there for three. They show up Monday evening. Sometimes they'll do a couple of votes Monday evening. They'll work a full day Tuesday, Wednesday, about a half day Thursday. Then everybody flies home. Now sometimes when you got a busy week, they don't get to fly home until like Friday morning. So those are the really rough weeks.