If it feels like Congress is doing less work than ever, it’s not your imagination. Last year, Congress passed fewer bills than ever before, and one of the main reasons is the refusal of the two parties to actually work together. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: If it feels like Congress is doing nothing, it’s because they are. There’s no imagination here. They’re doing nothing. Last year, Congress passed fewer bills than ever before, and one of the main reasons is the refusal of the two parties to work together. It is the most divided politics in American history, and this Congress is doing less in American history than have ever been done. I’ve got Farron Cousins to talk about this with me. Farron, what do you think?
Farron Cousins: This is not surprising at all. I mean, look, we were at the point where in a span of 10 months, we almost had five government shutdowns because Congress was so incompetent and so incapable of working with each other that they couldn’t even pass just regular, let’s keep working budget bills. So, because, you can’t even get past a budget, let alone try to work on something like another infrastructure package or revamping healthcare or literally anything, because they can’t even do the basic, fundamental job that they have of passing a budget every year.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Did you just say in less than six months, it’s happened eight times?
Farron Cousins:: Well, it was 10 months, five times.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. 10 months, five times, either way.
Farron Cousins: So every other month we’re on the verge of a shutdown.
Mike Papantonio: That is way crazy. So they were successful in passing a record level, low level, dysfunctional, disgusting, low level of 27 bills. It’s the lowest in American history, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Usually every year Congress will pass hundreds of pieces of legislation, or at least they had in the past. And some of those are minor. They’re let’s pass a quick resolution to do this. Let’s do a quick resolution naming this day, you know, Mike Papantonio day. But we can’t even do that anymore. 27 pieces of legislation and when you’re looking at a group of people that only work about 150 days a year, it’s insane how little is getting done. And like you said, it’s getting worse. We’ve done even less this year than we had by this point last year. And it is, you’ve got political scientists looking at this, you’ve got historians looking at it, and they’ve all kind of come to the conclusion, the number one factor is these people hate each other so much they won’t even talk to each other anymore.
Mike Papantonio: Actually, what’s so amazing about it is most of these folks don’t have to work. We’ve got a congress that has, as far as people who had to work for a living, labor people, what, we did a story on this couple of weeks ago, was it 3% or 8%? Something like that.
Farron Cousins: It’s insane. It’s in the single digits.
Mike Papantonio: Single digits of people that actually had to work for a living. So these people, our Congress that we have, well, they might not have started out like that, but they’re multimillionaires because of insider trading, because of all the scams they’re running. I mean, these are stories we’ve done. I’m not just saying this, we’ve done several stories about the insider trading. How somebody has started off and they got a hundred thousand dollars in the bank and within years, within a couple years, they’ve got $10 million in the bank. So they don’t have to work. So what they do is, what is it, they go home on Thursdays, right?
Farron Cousins: Usually, yes.
Mike Papantonio: Tell us, in other words, no matter what’s pending, they’re gonna go home on Thursdays and come back Monday, supposedly. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. Congress is technically in session three days a week. Okay. Seven day week, Congress has to be there for three. They show up Monday evening. Sometimes they’ll do a couple of votes Monday evening. They’ll work a full day Tuesday, Wednesday, about a half day Thursday. Then everybody flies home. Now sometimes when you got a busy week, they don’t get to fly home until like Friday morning. So those are the really rough weeks when you only get a three and a half day weekend. But they just took for Easter, their two week vacation. We don’t get that. Even kids in school don’t get a full two weeks for spring break. They take most of the month of August off. They take summer breaks. A month at Christmas. It’s insane how much time off these people take and deny us any kind of federally mandated leave.
Mike Papantonio: They don’t go home because they have to work. Because like I said, they don’t have to work. They’re, you know, the numbers are staggering, the statistics are amazing, the number of people that really have to work in Congress. So what they do is they airdrop in. Okay. They airdrop in just in time for the C-SPAN segment. Right. They’re standing in an empty room. If you get the impression that they’re talking to nobody, it’s because they are, they’re talking to nobody. But they step in for 10 minutes, they airdrop in and they do this show for us to make it look like, oh my God, you know, they’re still at it. It’s 10 o’clock at night, they hadn’t done anything all day. It’s 10 o’clock at night. You’d go, you think, what a hard worker. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. And a lot of people think, oh, well, they have to go back to their districts because they man their district offices, they’re doing campaigning. But studies have also shown us that the amount of time federal lawmakers are actually spending in their local offices has dwindled down to virtually nothing in recent years. So, no, they’re not actually working in their local offices. They may pop into a little local restaurant, shake a couple hands, smile for the camera and get on local news. But they’re gone in 10 minutes, off to do whatever the heck they want to do.
Mike Papantonio: Fundraiser.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. So they’re not working. And again, it cannot be understated enough, they won’t even talk to each other if they’re not a member of their party. And now we’ve got both parties just at each other’s throats in their own party.
Mike Papantonio: There are no more statesmen.
Farron Cousins: No.
Mike Papantonio: There are no more statesmen.
Farron Cousins: It’s a bunch of children.
Mike Papantonio: It’s like kids. It’s the same, and we see it, don’t we? We see it with what we do for a living, just on people that go crazy when we try to say something that they disagree with. They go nuts. Didn’t used to be like that. You and I have been doing this for over 20 years. Right. We started all the way back to the Air America days where you could have a conversation and people didn’t go nuts. That’s not the case anymore. But you would expect better in Washington.
