Tuesday evening, the president of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson announcement An early adjournment of the room, To say that there was nothing “sensitive to time” on which to work on. In doing so, he interrupted all Jeffrey Epstein. In doing so, he may also have inadvertently cemented 119th Congress‘s Position as one of the least productive congresses in history.
The 119th Congress, which met on January 3, 2025, for the end of the former president Joe BidenThe presidency and will end in January 2027, is, like any other congress, important to advance the legislation which affects the life of the American people of all kinds.
However, according to the Govtrack legislative monitoring website, its legislative action is lethargic. He only adopted 27 bills, much less than the number of bills adopted at the same time in most previous sessions since the 103rd congress, which met in 1993 when Bill Clinton was in power. It comes despite the Republicans having a majority of 219 to 212 in the House of Representatives and a majority of 53 to 45 Senate.
During his 1948 re -election campaign, Democratic President Harry Truman raged against a “congress” controlled by the Republican to hinder his legislative priorities. Is the 119th Congress of Trump comparable?
Talk to Newsweek, Mark Shanahan, who teaches American policy at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, said that Congress adopted less invoices because it only acts on questions Trump wanted to move forward. That, and the RepublicanThin majorities of the two chambers have slowed down the adoption of the legislation, he said.
“It is a congress that acts as a rubber stamp for the president, and not as a vigorous legislature separated from the executive in his powers and his actions,” he said. “The second Trump administration keeps its campaign promises, no more, no less, and is blinked by anything beyond its somewhat compensation program. But the congress is entirely under the presidential thumb, acting in a hyper-partisan way and only provides what Trump is painful with majorities in the House and the Senate is the strongest whole that Capitol Hill has ever seen.
Scott Lucas, who teaches international politics at the University College Dublin, agreed that “Trump reigns by the decree” and only goes to the congress for “great high -level legislation”. He said Nowsweek That the Trump administration had been “much more ambitious” in its use of decrees in its second mandate and that it was more “authoritarian”. “If you are the great authority, why do you need the congress?”
Although the 119th congress has adopted relatively few bills, it is not the slightest congress of the law since 1993. This status belongs to the 118th congress, the least productivewho had adopted 13 bills by a comparable step in his session.
However, this came in the middle of the divisions. The Republicans checked the house Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House. There were also intestine struggles in the Republican party which led to Kevin McCarthy lose the speaker. This affected the capacity of the congress to remove the legislation.
Meanwhile, during the first eight months of the 104th congress in 1995, only 22 bills were adopted. By adopting 27 laws, the 119th congress is the third productive session of the congress since January 1993.
On the other hand, according to Govtrack data, the most productive session of the congress was the 103rd session, when 82 bills were adopted. The 108th was also among the most productive, adopting 76 tickets during the third quarter of George W. Bushis the first mandate.
Meanwhile, the two sessions of the Congress which coincided with the first term of Trump, the 115th and 116th, were also more productive than the current mandate of the congress, with 55 and 56 bills adopted, respectively, at the end of August during their first year at the Congress.
However, all of this can be meaningless. Richard Johnson, lecturer in American politics and politics at Queen Mary University of London in the United Kingdom, said that “the number of laws adopted is not his own informative of the activity of the congress”.
“We see a diagram now of the congress adopting major omnibus bills, which would have historically been several laws, was launched in one,” he said Nowsweek. “For example, the Big Beautiful Bill Act was at least five different bills in one: a tax bill, a social protection reform bill, a bill for the repeal on climate subsidies, a bill on immigration and security and a various financing bill. Crude figures do not tell us about the size, scale or importance of the legislation.”
The 119th congress will resume its session in September. Whether he returns with a burst of legislation or continues his relatively slow approach remains to be seen.
