Before I get into my post let me assure you I despise Boehner, Cantor, Ryan, McConnell, Graham, Cruz, Paul, Aoyette, et al. I despise their politics that are so openly partisan.
Now, having said that, there is merit to their argument that congress should not necessarily just be a manufacturing line of bills to be passed into law. Using the number of bills passed by a congress is not the proper metric; in my opinion. We all know that bills, which get passed into law, often - very often - have unintended and, even, opposite consequences from what they were trying to effect. So just shooting laws out the end of the line is not really the proper thing for OUR legislators to do.
Thoughtful legislation should be what the congress passes - yes, that is an oxymoron these days. It is sad that any thoughtful and beneficial legislation is, therefore, being obstructed by the GOP House and, also, the President's completely constitutional right to make law through Executive Orders is being challenged. That does not, as some have said, undermine the "checks and balances" of our system. The Congress is free to pass bills that reverse Executive Orders and the Judiciary is free to find them unconstitutional upon review.
If congress did nothing but pass just a few bills that had a positive impact on jobs, infrastructure, health and education during its session that would be fine, again, in my opinion. I'm okay with the concept of them not legislating everything in business or our lives - like contraception. I have my own Libertarian and GOP streaks from time to time.
Now, however, you see where I would turn the debate. I would turn it on the responsibility of our legislators to pursue beneficial legislation - BOTH Dem and GOP. Defining "beneficial" is not so difficult as one might think. A bill that is beneficial to corporations at the expense of the citizens is not a beneficial bill for our Republic. Simple math and economics formulas and environmental impact studies could point this out. I would argue that I agree FEWER bills are okay with the caveat that the fewer bills should allow our legislators to undertake greater concerns in a substantive measure. Substance and quality over raw quantity has usually won out in the long-term in our "free-market" society.
Unfortunately, none of what I believe fits easily into a 30-second lead-in to a one or two-minute "news" story. Nor does it "tweet" well in 140 characters or less. These "short-attention-span" benchmarks are now the standard for delivering "news" to people who, constantly, have their finger on the change-channel/internet-forum buttons of today's life. Who, in the USA, are more concerned with where they can get their next latte rather than how they can be citizens and effect a good government.
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