do-nothings

i happened, today, to read a piece on the blog naked capitalism, written by a theretofore-unknown-to-me contributor named 'lune', entitled 'congressional legislation part II.' in the post, lune analyzed the legislative process in the context of the contemporary institutional culture of congress. the big point, or what i thought was most prominent, was that much less time in congress is available to congressmen and women. lune proposed that this was due to a greater pressure to fundraise now than was previously extant. as the story goes, officials used to move to washington upon being elected, affording them ample time to spend five days a week doing their jobs. now, however, such devotion to the forty hour workweek is the exception rather than the rule, most congressmen and women choosing instead to commute in on tuesday from their home states and leave again on thursday. the rest of their time is spent filling up their coffers to ensure ample supplies for their ever-costlier reelection bids.

it's important to know that this argument is essentially a paraphrasing of one made by a writer named norman ornstein. ornstein, writing two years earlier in the washington post, said exactly the same thing. the number of days spent in deliberation that lune quotes for the congressional session 2006, 71, is also the number provided by ornstein, though lune cites a later abcnews article as his/her source. that's fine; i don't believe that lune was plagiarizing, only that the whole thing may have been recycled a few time since it left ornstein's keyboard. ornstein's case is quite compelling, and it seems, at first glance, that the numbers are irrefutable. in 1947, having spent just 104 days in session, the 80th congress caused an uproar when it was labeled the 'do-nothings' by president truman. nowadays, ornstein says, we'd be lucky to see our representatives working so hard.

i admit that i was swayed when i first read both lune and ornstein. something seems very wrong with the way that congress works, namely, that it never gets anything done. i decided that i would post on the subject, and that, instead of merely rephrasing it for a third time, i would go to the data and provide some original insights. maybe i would make a chart comparing the downturn in length of congressional sessions to the upturn in campaign costs since some faraway year. the senate, i discovered, keeps records of congressional activity, and has done so since 1947 (coincidence?). it was here that things became complicated. i'll let this graph explain why.

first of all, the trend in the number of days spent in session is flat, if not slightly increasing. more important, and more visible, however, is the trend in the total number of hours. this is quite apparently on the upswing. i don't know where ornstein got his data, but congress's records do not corroborate his story. congress, by all accounts, is working harder than it used to.

it was then, however, that i began looking for other metrics to gauge the legislature's productivity. working time itself is no absolute indicator of working success. maybe they stay up later because there's better chinese take-out in washington than there used to be. maybe they buy a lotta sex. i don't know. lucky for me that the congressional records include statistics for the legislative process. this includes bills and measures passed, as well as measures introduced, quoroms, etc. i chose only the first three to operationalize my dependent variable (congress's laziness), largely because it's a wednesday and i should be doing other, paid work. what do the charts say here?

now, that's more like the congress i know. the trend here is irrefutable: there has been a dramatic decline in the productivity of congress since the 40's. all those extra working hours have translated into a 50% decline in measures passed and a 70% drop in bills enacted. as for measures introduced, the trend is more of the same:

that spike in the late sixties and early seventies aside, the mean for the past three decades is at least 10-15% below what it was in the 40's and 50's.

what are the potential problems with this data? first, by beginning in the 40's, it conceals the bump effect of the federal government's enormous expansion during the 30's. it could be argued that congress simply returned to a longer-term historical average post-1970, so that the intervening four decades were little more than an aberration. i don't have the data to confirm or disprove this, but i think a strong statement against it is made by comparison to the consistently longer hours congress has been spending in session since '47. if that had trended downwards as well, i would be more inclined to dismiss the recent slump in legislative activity. as it stands, my hackles are still up.

what's left to explain is why. have bills become longer? is it really true that legislating has become more complex, as a greater amount of information has become available? i'm inclined to believe that the growth of the lobbying industry during the 70's has something to do with it. congress may spend a lot more time tacking riders onto bills than it used to, which would account both for the mammoth size of bills and the time it takes to produce them. anybody know where i can find the average size of a law these days?