Democratic Congress Do-Nothing Scorecard

With an 11% approval rating and coming under increasingly severe criticism for not accomplishing anything, Democrats have pointed out that they have passed 107 bills that have been signed into law. Wow, maybe this Democratic majority is accomplishing something. Let's take a look.

47 of the bills named a road, post office, or courthouse. That doesn't seem like much of an "accomplishment" in doing the work of the American people. Let's keep going.

14 of the bills were simply extensions of laws that had been previously passed by a Republican lead Congress. Well, that doesn't sound like an accomplishment either. Let's keep going.

2 of the bills were passed over the strong objections of the Democratic majority leadership: funding our troops and the Protect America Now act.

But wait, that still leaves 44 bills. Certainly something of major importance has been accomplished here. Actually, these are all non-controversial bills that passed without much debate. Here are some typical examples:

H.R. 475 – House Page Board Revision Act.
S. 277 – Grand Teton National Park Extension Act.
S. 676 – Allowing the Executive Director or Alternate Executive Director serve on the Board of Directors of the Inter-American Foundation
S. 1537 – Authorizing the transfer of funds from the Senate Gift Shop Revolving Fund to the Senate Employee Child Care Center.

Now wait you say. They did pass S. 1 – Honest Leadership & Open Government Act. That was the cornerstone of Nancy Pelosi's commitment to "drain the swamp" by enacting tough ethics reform, to reduce pork-barrel politics, and to eliminate the corrupt practice of earmarks. Let's peek in side that one and see how they did.

Congressional Democrats corrupted the bill by:

• Removing a provision to ban the trading of pork projects for votes;
• Weakening provisions aimed at stopping pork projects that financially benefit lawmakers;
• Transferring Senate earmark enforcement powers from the neutral Senate parliamentarian to the partisan Senate Majority Leader;
• Permitting bills to be voted on without first disclosing pork projects; and
• Weakening a provision requiring that pork projects be made available on the Internet before congressional votes.

The newly "reformed" Democratic Congress has managed an an astonishing 11,351 earmarks to date. Actually the number probably increased while I was writing this. In addition, backtracking on their promises, the Democrat lead Congress applied these new rules only to earmarks in appropriations bills and chose to ignore earmarks in tax, entitlement or authorization bills. Perhaps this explains why Congress has still not provided an annual appropriations bill to the President as they are required.

Earlier this year, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wisconsin) announced his intention to keep secret the pork projects in spending bills until after the bills had been passed the House. A public outcry finally forced him to reverse course. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) recently announced that it will no longer even track pork projects.

Are Nancy and Harry draining the swamp or filling it up?

Dang it - surely they've accomplished something! I guess they did pass a minimum wage bill - but only after being forced by the GOP to include tax break provisions to offset the damage the bill was going to do to small businesses.