Our Worst Investment, Congress

Many in Congress fail to realize most us out here in taxpayer land feel like Lamar Alexander did in 1996.  Little is accomplished in that domed building at the east end of the Mall in Washington, D.C.

Another day in Congress.

When Lamar Alexander, the former Tennessee governor and U.S. secretary of Education, ran for president back then, he spent a lot of time complaining about Congress.  Although he wore a sunflower tie more than he did his trademark red-plaid-everyman shirt, he would rail on Congress at every campaign stop always finishing in a southern laden crescendo of his tagline, “cut their pay and send them home.”  He wasn’t an Occupy Washington protester ahead of his time, but he does occupy the nation’s capitol these days.  He ran for president again in 2000 and now serves as the senior senator from Tennessee having first won office in 2002.   He rarely talks about cutting Congressional pay and sending people home anymore.

Most of us occupying the rest of the country agree with the Will Rogers saying, “We feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.”  We do, that is, until we want Congress to do something for us.  Mostly, we believe Congress does very little.  This year reality appears to match the long held opinion.

A quick look at Thomas, the legislative information service of the Library of Congress, reveals how little the 112^th Congress has accomplished in 2011.  A sum total of 44 bills and joint resolutions have cleared both the House and the Senate this year.  That may not seem like a low number, until you consider these actions can be broken into two groups.

About 70% or 31 of the bills and resolutions may be important, but, dare I say it, less than monumental.

18.2 % or 8 bills named federal buildings after people
(five post offices – one each in Mississippi, Ohio, and California and two in Texas; and a courthouse in Arizona; a courthouse in Missouri; and the federal building in West Virginia)

6.8% or 3 actions appointed/reappointed Smithsonian Institution board members
(Shirley Ann Jackson, Stephen M. Case and Robert P. Kogood)

11.3% or 5 actions involved continuing appropriations
(A continuing appropriation is legislation passed when the new fiscal year is about to begin or has begun to provide budget authority for Federal agencies and programs to continue in operation until the regular appropriations acts are enacted.  In other words, there is nothing new here people.  Move along.)

4.7% or 2 bills deal with mind numbingly simple issues
(One extended the F.B.I. director’s term of service by 25 months.  The other changes the due date of the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission Act final report from April 30, 2011, to November 30, 2011, and the final termination date of the Commission from May 30, 2011, to December 31, 2011.  Hope nobody missed a fundraiser to work on these.)

9% or 4 bills are the four parts of the same act, the Airport and Airway Extension Act of 2011
(Four bills broken into bite-sized chunks.  Didn’t the President get ridiculed for suggesting Congress do the same with his Jobs bill?)

20% or 9 bills are extensions of previous laws scheduled to sunset.  To be fair, I excluded a few of these extensions from this list and moved them to the group below, because those bills modified previous legislation to a much greater extent than these which arguably appear to involve little more than changing dates, effectively passing the buck until later.
(Small Business Additional Temporary Extension Act of 2011, PATRIOT Sunsets Extension Act of 2011, United States Parole Commission Extension Act of 2011, Short-Term TANF Extension Act, Surface and Air Transportation Programs Extension Act of 2011, Combating Autism Reauthorization Act of 2011, Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2011, FISA Sunsets Extension Act of 2011, temporary extension of programs under the Small Business Act and the Small Business Investment Act of 1958, and for other purposes)

About 30% or 13 bills are important and one can understand why crafting and passing them might take some time.

9% or 4 bills are the trade pacts with Colombia, Panama and South Korea that have been lingering in Congress for years and the related workers’ assistance bill
(It took Congress seven years to act on Colombian pact andthe Panamanians approved their pact more than four years ago.  The South Korean pact, on the other hand, was signed earlier this year.)

6.8% or 3 bills relate to budgets
S. 365 is kind of a big deal, but it mostly kicked the problem down the road a ways.  The Budget Control Act of 2011 is the result of the painful debt ceiling debate of the summer.  It instituted more than $900 billion in reduced agency budgets over 10 years and set up the supercommittee to trim as much as $1.5 trillion over the same length of time.

H.R. 1473, the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, (need I say more?)

H.R. 754 authorizes appropriations for intelligence and intelligence-related activities of the United States Government, the Community Management Account, and the Central Intelligence Agency Retirement and Disability System, and for other purposes.

4.7% or 2 bills deal with Veterans’ issues
H.R. 2646, the Veterans Health Care Facilities Capital Improvement Act of 2011, also names two facilities after people, but it has a lot to do with construction and facilities.  It also addresses actual health care for veterans.

H.R. 1383, Restoring GI Bill Fairness Act of 2011, adjusts the amounts available for veterans’ education and lowers the amount the V.A. can collect from home loans.

4.7% or 2 bills deal consumers or children
H.R. 2883, the Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act renewed many child welfare laws and programs, but is significant in its scope.

HR. 2715 amends the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 by addressing the amount of lead in toys and providing new authorities to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

4.7% or 2 bills deal with business and patents
H.R. 1249, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, is the most significant change to the U.S. patent system since 1952.  (Nice going, guys)

H.R. 4 repeals expanded Form 1099 information reporting requirements for certain business payments and rental property expense payments.

Here’s the thing.  Few people’s job performance can be summed up in a single grade sheet, but the one laid out here is miserable.  Note, for instance, the number of jobs bills included in the above list. Yet, ask our elected officials and, to a person, they will say job creation is their priority.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the annual base pay of a member of Congress is $174,000.  Each member has more than $1.5 million dollars to hire up to 18 workers and run his offices.  Their colleagues in the Senate have $3.3 million avaiable to them to hire staff and such.

We are getting a lousy return on our Congressional investment.

However, thinking about this reminds me I have a red plaid shirt.  I doubt it carries the outsider cache it once did, but I might dig it out and put it on anyway.  With any luck wearing it might help me score one of those well paid/low expectation jobs like Mr. Alexander’s.

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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com

This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register blog entry.