Take a Bow 112th Congress! The Most Unproductive Ever

     This Congress has consistently had terrible poll numbers and we can now quantitatively see that it's fully deserved. The Congress was bad, but it was bad on the grand scale, as an outlier. It's now officially the most unproductive Congress ever, far worse than the 80th Congress- the 1946-48 GOP Congress that Harry Truman gave hell...

    "According to a Huffington Post review of all the bills that hit President Barack Obama's desk this session, Obama has signed 219 bills passed by the 112th Congress into law. With less than a week to go in the year, there are currently another 20 bills pending presidential action. In comparison, the last Congress passed 383 bills, while the one before it passed 460."

    "The 104th Congress (1995-1996) currently holds the ignominious distinction of being the least productive session of Congress, according to the U.S. House Clerk's Office, which has records going back to 1947. Just 333 bills became law during that two-year period, meaning the 112th Congress needs to send nearly 100 more bills to Obama's desk in the next few days if it wants to avoid going down in history -- an unlikely prospect, considering that both chambers are squarely focused on averting the "fiscal cliff" before the new year."

    "The 112th Congress has done far less than the 80th Congress (1947-1948), which President Harry Truman infamously dubbed the "Do-Nothing Congress." Those lawmakers passed 906 bills that became law."
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      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/congress-unproductive_n_2371387.html

      It's fitting that this Congress is poised to best the record for futility set by the Gingrich Congress of 1995-96. Conservatives like to say that the government that governs least governs best, but this Congress hasn't governed at all.

      "At least 40 bills, including ones awaiting Obama's signature, concerned the renaming of post offices or other public buildings. Another six dealt with commemorative coins."

     "Meanwhile, significant pieces of legislation that have traditionally received bipartisan support -- such as the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act -- have been blocked."

       Yes, obstructing the VAWA. Unlike Mitt Romney's term at Bain Capital, nobody can call this Congress stellar. Not suprisingly, Boehner's office has no comment for this ignominious record setting performance. Harry Reid rightly points out that a large part of the discredit for this can be chalked up tothe record filibusters by McConnell's Senate minority:

      "When asked for comment on the record of the 112th Congress, Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), pointed to the 115 times the Republican minority has held up a bill's passage by threatening to filibuster it. House Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office did not return a request for comment."

       "The lack of bipartisanship in Congress has been lost on no one. In April, Thomas Mann of the left-leaning Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute published a Washington Post op-ed saying that the GOP deserves the blame for the dysfunction."

      "We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional," they wrote. "In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party."

       Take a bow, Messrs. Boehner and McConnell. You failed the old fashioned way: you earned it. In doing so, you failed but at least you failed at a record setting pace.