Contrary to beliefs, Congress gets a lot done

Oct. 5—Congress has a well-deserved reputation for partisan bickering, but that hasn't kept it from passing meaningful legislation in a bipartisan fashion.

How majority parties actually get things done — and what to expect after the 2022 midterm election — was the subject of a lunchtime talk Tuesday at Washington State University's Foley Institute.

James Curry, a political science professor at the University of Utah, noted that majority parties "inevitably" under-deliver on their campaign promises.

Nevertheless, he pushed back against the notion that Congress is beset by partisan gridlock, incapable of agreeing on anything in today's hyper-aggressive environment.

"It's important to remember that, even if majority parties under-deliver, it's not as if they achieve nothing," Curry said. "Every two years, Congress passes a substantial amount of law. This runs contrary to what most of us are told."

Although the number of bills passed during each session of Congress has steadily declined since the 1950s, he said, the amount of legislation — as measured by the number of pages of new statutes — has nearly quadrupled.

"In other words, while Congress is passing fewer and fewer bills, it's passing bigger and bigger bills that do more things," Curry said.

It's also the case, he said, that "nearly all of this legislation is bipartisan. That's also contrary to what most of us are told."

Over the last 50 years, Curry said, the percentage of House members who vote for every single bill that becomes law has remained remarkably steady, at about 85% to 90%.

"We see a similar pattern in the Senate," he said. "It votes on fewer things, but the things that pass get 80 to 85 senators to support it, on average."

Curry and Princeton University Professor Frances Lee — who spoke at the Foley Institute last week — found four main pathways by which majority parties accomplish their agenda goals.

Three of those four pathways require some level of compromise and cooperation with the minority party, he said.

"By far the most common pathway to success is backing down," Curry said.

That's an approach by which the majority first proposes a contentious, partisan version of a bill, but then removes some of the more extreme provisions until it secures at least some minority party support.

For example, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which passed in 2021, started out as a multitrillion-dollar proposal that included a number of provisions Republicans opposed, including higher corporate taxes.

In order to gain Republican support, Democrats eliminated the tax component and scaled back the total cost of the legislation. It passed 69-30 in the Senate and 228-206 in the House.

Other pathways to success, Curry said, include "log-rolling," whereby the majority incorporates some minority party provisions in the bill, or simply proposing a bill that has broad, bipartisan support to begin with.

Taken together, he said, those three pathways account for about 85% of all the major legislative priorities passed by Congress since 1985.

By contrast, "steamrolling" a bill or passing it in a purely partisan fashion, over the objection of the minority party, only accounted for 14% of the majority party's legislative successes during that same time period.

Regardless of how the midterm election turnout, Curry said, these same pathways to success will be seen during the next session of Congress.

"Majority parties are rarely able to achieve their wildest ambitions," he said. "But every year they enact new policies, and most of those require compromise. We should expect the same after the midterm."

An archived video of Curry's talk, as well as last week's talk by Frances Lee, can be found on the Foley Institute's YouTube page at youtube.com/c/FoleyInstitute.

Spence may be contacted at bspence@lmtribune.com or (208) 791-9168.