CONGRESS - is it the broken branch? Flashcards
decreasing productivity
80th congress passed 906 bills
116th congress passed 344 public laws
115th congress passed 442 statutes
filibusters
there have been more than 2,000 filibusters since 1917; about half have been in just the last 12 years.
it is increasingly disrupting the passageway of bills.
conference committees
a conference committee is a joint committee, appointed by the House and Senate to resolve disagreements on a particular bill.
use of conference committees has significantly declined - 115th congress; saw just 7 of these committee reports.
power of the purse
congress fights over the discretionary funding and not the mandatory funding - discretionary spending refers to the programs that have their funding appropriated by congress each financial year.
congress is struggling to pass these appropriation bills, as between 1977 and 2014, there were only 4 fiscal years where congress passed all of its appropriation bills ahead of the deadline.
government shutdowns
2013 Oct - congress failed to pass appropriation bills because of the Republican House and Democratic Senate.
the House wanted to defund Obamacare healthcare reforms and the Senate refused to vote for such a bill.
800,000 federal employees were sent home and this considerably impacted the Republicans bc Americans blamed them for the shutdown.
eval for congress being the broken branch
Founding Fathers
partisanship
the structure of congress was done LIKE THIS FOR A REASON - the Founding Fathers purposefully created a strong House and Senate with equal legislative power because they wanted to make it harder pass bad laws.
just because there is partisanship, doesn’t mean that there isn’t legislation passed with bipartisan support.
hyper-partisanship
a term coined by Ronald Brownstein in 2007, who argues that ‘on almost every major issue, the distance between two parties has widened…’
thus, conservative Dems and moderate Reps are becoming rarer.
