Less Than 1% Of Bills Introduced This Congress Have Become Laws: Analysis

There are, to paraphrase the famous “Schoolhouse Rock” animated TV short , a lot of bills and they’re still sittin’ on Capitol Hill.

And unlike the bill in that cartoon, they face tougher odds than ever of actually becoming a law. According to a Washington-based software firm, a meager 0.37% of all the bills introduced in the 118th Congress have made it into law.

The analysis by Quorum, which makes software for lobbying and advocacy groups, said the 46 laws enacted through the end of April, out of 12,354 bills introduced, was the lowest percentage of successful bills going back to at least the 101st Congress, which met in 1990 and 1991.

“You’re welcome, America! The less we do, the better,” said Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), the chairman of the rightwing House Freedom Caucus, when asked about the low numbers.

While the proportion of bills that get enacted is only one metric of how productive a Congress is, and critics say a too simplistic one, the new figure is only the latest evidence of lawmakers’ inability to, well, make laws.

A HuffPost analysis in November , prior to a recent spurt of activity that brought the current number of laws up to 63, found Congress was at its slowest pace of lawmaking since the Congress of 1931 and 1932, which met on a different schedule and didn’t start meeting until December 1931.

And at least one lawmaker has said Congress is on pace to make the fewest laws since the Civil War.

Of course, there are caveats: Some say the number of bills is less important than their content, and many bills now deal with several subjects while in the past they may have dealt only with one apiece. In the case of the Quorum percentage, the number of bills has been padded a bit by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.)