The 119th Congress Made Records for Being The Most Inactive, Unaccomplished, Dysfunctional Congress
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| Speaker of the House Mike Johnson during a news conference at the Capitol on April 9, 2024.Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images |
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Congress already set one record last fall with a 43-day government shutdown: the longest government funding lapse in U.S. history. Now, with the ongoing shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security surpassing the 35-day shutdown of President Donald Trump’s first term, lawmakers in this Congress can claim another distinction: the second-longest funding lapse in modern history.
By multiple measures, this Congress is breaking records — largely for dysfunction.
For instance, in the first year of the 119th Congress, the House held the fewest number of roll-call votes in the first session in decades — 362, according to congressional records. The next two lowest on the list? The first year of the 102nd Congress, which held 439 roll-call votes throughout 1991, and the 117th Congress, which held 449 throughout 2021. (Democrats controlled the chamber both of those years.)
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By comparison, during the 118th Congress — when the GOP also controlled the House — the chamber cast 724 roll-call votes in the first year, ranking among the busier first sessions of the past few decades.
Some of the roll-call disparity — undoubtedly — is driven by the House GOP’s strategy during last fall’s shutdown, when House Republican leaders opted to keep their caucus out of Washington for weeks rather than work on other legislation or cast additional votes, as Senate lawmakers worked to land a shutdown-ending deal.
But congressional data also shows that in the first year of the 119th Congress, the second-fewest number of bills became law since at least the 1970s: 45. That is surpassed only by the 29 in the 118th Congress, when the GOP led the House and Democrats controlled the Senate and White House. (In the 1970s, some Congresses saw upwards of 200 bills become law in the first year alone.)
Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., who serves as the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, argues that these data points demonstrate the GOP’s “poor leadership” of the chamber.
Of course, Republicans argue that this is not a fair metric, noting the number of disparate measures they swept up into their massive single reconciliation bill, which included an extension of tax cuts, significant reductions to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and increased funding for immigration enforcement.
Republicans were proud of the legislation, arguing that its passage would “spark massive economic growth, wage increases, and take-home pay.” In the short term, though, that has not happened. Less than two weeks ago, the Bureau of Economic Analysis revised its estimate of economic growth in the fourth quarter of 2025, calculating that the economy grew at an anemic 0.7% — down from 4.4% in the third quarter, when the bill was passed. Nominal wages also didn’t go up much, despite lawmakers and the president enacting a bill that will cost $3.4 trillion over the next decade.
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But lawmakers have also earned other ignominious merits during this Congress — particularly when it comes to legislating and not following the will of the majority.
The House has already set a record for the successful deployment of a rarely used, last-ditch parliamentary maneuver called a discharge petition — a tool that allows House lawmakers to go around leaders to force votes on legislation that has majority support.
So far in this Congress, four pieces of legislation have clinched the 218 signatures needed to force floor action in the House — more than any Congress going back decades.
Notably, because of the composition of the House, reaching 218 signatures meant that a handful of Republicans had to buck their own party’s leadership and join Democrats in signing on to the petitions.
The bills that got sufficient support included legislation by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., to release the Epstein files and a bill by House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York to extend expired enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies for three years.
Jeffries — who aims to become speaker during the next Congress — has touted this metric, arguing that it’s proof Republican leaders have lost control and that Democrats “are governing in the minority on behalf of the American people as if we’re in the majority.”
A spokesperson for House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., declined to comment for this article.
But Johnson’s desire to avoid votes on proposals that have the backing of the majority has also forced him to deploy a more closed legislative process than ever before.
Although steeped in parliamentary procedure and largely overlooked by the public, the House Rules Committee holds a great deal of power on Capitol Hill — serving as a gatekeeper for legislation before it is considered on the House floor by the entire chamber.
The members of the panel determine what amendments get — or don’t get — a vote, thereby shaping the contours of the debate on major pieces of legislation.
Democrats on the Rules Committee, however, argue that Republicans have effectively stymied the opportunity for amendments — breaking yet another record in the process.
A report compiled by committee Democrats shows that the GOP made zero amendments in order for 95 separate pieces of legislation throughout the first year of the 119th Congress — setting, they argue, a record for so-called closed rules in the first year of any Congress ever.
The report also finds that roughly 80% of amendments offered have been blocked — “up from 61% in the 115th Congress and nearly 70% in the 118th Congress during the previous two Republican majorities.”
McGovern, the top Democrat on the panel, argued that these records are the result of the GOP being afraid to cross the president — and demonstrate that Congress has essentially turned into a rubber stamp for the president’s wishes.
“Speaker Johnson is scared shitless of the White House,” McGovern told MS NOW. “He’s afraid that bills could be — might be — amended in a way that gets broad bipartisan support.”
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Of course, Johnson became speaker in part by promising to return the chamber to “regular order” — “member-driven” and committee-led — rather than implementing a “top-down” approach.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas — one of the most outspoken defenders of “regular order” in the House — declined to directly answer when asked if he believed the speaker was standing by his promise. Instead, he defended the speaker, saying it’s “a tough circumstance with a two-seat majority.”
“It just is what it is,” he added. “I try to give a whole lot of grace on how you manage through this process and complex environment.”
Republicans on the Rules Committee, for their part, say the Democratic data is at best lacking in nuance.
A spokesperson for the Republicans on the panel noted that only a portion of the rules was reported out as “closed” at the discretion of the committee itself.
For instance, the spokesperson said, of the 95 pieces of legislation the Democrats invoke, 25 were Congressional Review Act measures, which are not amendable. (The CRA allows Congress to overturn federal agency regulations.)
Members also never offered amendments for 20 of the bills in question.
“There’s a lot of nuance here,” Rules Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., told MS NOW.
As for McGovern’s accusation that Republicans are merely shutting down debate at the behest of the president, Foxx said “both parties do that.”
“Don’t live in a glass house and throw stones,” Foxx said.
To be sure, the suggestion that Congress is not living up to its Article 1 constitutional mandate is nothing new. For years, observers have written about a branch that is increasingly less interested in legislating and more interested in partisan messaging.
Former Rep. Fred Upton, a Republican who represented Michigan in the House for 36 years, recently bemoaned to The Washington Post that, despite learning in ninth grade that there are three branches of government, “right now, the Congress is not one of them.”
“It abdicated everything to the White House,” Upton said.
In Congress’ lawmaking absence, presidents have turned to executive orders — and Trump’s record-breaking 2025 only serves to underscore the point. Throughout his first year back in office, Trump signed 225 executive orders, according to the Federal Register.
That towers over the 77 executive orders Joe Biden signed in his first year and the 55 Trump signed back in 2017 — the first year of his first term.
But there are other, qualitative indications that the 119th Congress is one that’s less interested in legislating than previous Congresses.
For the better part of a year, the House GOP used a procedural trick to block any votes to renege the president’s global tariffs — despite the economic pressures back home.
And a majority of Republicans have repeatedly voted against placing restrictions on Trump’s military authority. That, in particular, has been proof for at least one GOP lawmaker that something has changed with the legislative branch.
“This is a Congress without ambition,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told reporters as the Senate voted down a war powers resolution on Iran. “This is a Congress without a belief structure in defending legislative prerogative. They just are a rubber stamp for whatever a president tells them to do.”
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