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Wednesday, July 13, 2016

GOP-led Senate passing bills at rate not seen in decades

The Senate is off to its best year since 1990 by at least one measure, with more than 30 of its bills having been signed into law by President Obama.

Eighteen months into Republican control of the Senate, the upper chamber has settled into a new normal. The partisan fights remain, and senators aren’t spending much time on the floor debating bills — but they are passing them, and at a surprising clip.

All told, including the 31 Senate bills and 42 House-written bills, Congress approved 73 measures that Mr. Obama signed into law from January through the end of June. That’s nearly three times the number of bills approved in the first six months of 2015 and 20 more than in 2014, which was the last year Democrats had control of the Senate.

“The new Republican Congress, under the leadership of Sen. McConnell, operates under a dramatically different approach than the Democrats in the previous Congress,” Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said in a statement. “Sen. McConnell opened the Senate, and despite efforts by the Democrat leadership to block bipartisan legislation, we have returned to a more functioning Senate, and allowed senators to participate in the legislative process. While this isn’t the easy way, it allowed members to have more than dysfunction to show for their time in the Senate.”

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll never understand the narrative that passing more laws is a "success" . There may be few new laws needed, but what really needs to happen is to repeal all the crap that's on the books now. Or, almost as good....just don't do anything.

Anonymous said...

God help us. What has the U.S. Senate wrought? The longer they are in D.C., the worse it gets. We DON'T need more bills and laws. Someone please STOP these idiots.

Anonymous said...

Most of them we would consider the Republican establishment as caving to the dumbocrats. That only helps them - not the American citizen.

KBinLA said...

You all are right, we don't need any new laws. But, these 'representatives' of ours seem to get some sort of 'rooster strut' persona for writing them. And, until that is settled we're gonna have this BS.
What is ACTUALLY needed is for them to start bringing up existing laws and revisiting their usefulness today. Then revising them if there is merit in doing so.
[clink ¢, clink ¢]

Rebel Without a Clue said...

KBinLA is absolutely correct! Now is the time to revisit existing laws and either do away with the irrelevant ones or modify them to make them more relevant to today's world. I think that the US has more "laws" than any other country in the world. No wonder lawyers make so much money.