Surprise! Congress is actually getting things done
By Jonathan Bernstein / Bloomberg Opinion
There’s been a lot of major news lately, between the war in Ukraine and inflation still rising and the return of baseball (hurrah!) with a depressingly bad new playoff structure (ugh), but meanwhile, the U.S. Congress keeps governing.
A shift toward getting lots of legislative work done is now paying off. I can’t give the senators and representatives too high a grade for finishing the job on yearly spending bills this week, because it happened more than five months into the fiscal year, but at least they did it; which not every Congress has managed. The spending legislation was folded into an aid package for Ukraine and the Violence Against Women Act, finally re-authorized after years of partisan stalemate. The Senate also gave final approval to a bill to reform the U.S. Postal Service, another measure that had been been around for awhile without going anywhere. Last week, it was a bill about arbitration in cases of sexual assault. It seems likely that a few more important things will pass at some point this year.
With two mega-sized bills enacted last year, the pandemic relief measure and the infrastructure spending law, along with a few others, this Congress is becoming an increasingly productive one, even though Democrats are disappointed that they couldn’t enact more of their agenda. Still, Democrats deserve credit for pragmatism and for being ready to legislate on a range of topics.
Republicans, too, have turned out to be quite a bit more open to bargaining and compromise than I (and many other observers) expected. Or at least enough of them to reach 60 votes in the Senate and overcome the still-omnipresent Republican filibusters. And while the filibusters on nominations are still forcing too many positions to remain vacant for too long and for no good reason, the Republicans really have let up on confirmations of ambassadors. Indeed, five more passed by voice vote Thursday night before Congress left for the weekend.
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