The Left-Cheek Ass Clown for December, 2024

Well, Dear Readers, we've come down to the final Ass Clown Award of the year ...

The Left-Cheek Ass Clown for December, 2024

It's been a difficult year for this award, not because of a lack of worthy nominees, but rather because of an overwhelming tsunami of potential winners. From politics to religion to the media to society at large, it's been a year of towering achievements in ass clownery, making each selection an exercise in hand-wringing desperation. But be that as it may, you depend on me to single out the winners, and I'm obligated to rise to the task.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Readers, our final ass clown awardee for 2024 is

The 118th Congress

The 118th Congress is, by some measures, the most unproductive in decades, if not ever. From the ludicrous bureaucratic knife-fighting among House Republicans over the Speakership to the self-inflicted wounds of useless and ignorant poison-pill legislation, to the inability to simply pass a budget, to the craven submission to end-of-year pressure by President-Elect Musk and Junior Co-President Der Furor, Congress became a national and international laughingstock whose main achievement seemed to be allowing Italy to point to a nation with a more unstable government*. 

But how is Congressional productivity measured? Most media coverage of Congress’s productivity uses the number of bills passed into law as a yardstick. But this is an overly simplistic approach because it considers all bills, regardless of substance, as equally important. For instance, a measure naming a post office counts the same as a declaration of war or a multi-billion dollar spending bill, or major tax legislation. 

The raw number of bills passed also ignores the fact that since World War II, Congress has tended to pass fewer, but longer bills, such as the gigantic omnibus spending packages that have replaced the larger number of individual funding bills that were traditionally negotiated and passed. 

But it's the yardstick we have, and with it we can look at the statistics provided by LegiScan for the 118th Congress:

Number of Laws Passed (with a PL Number): 158

Number of Laws Which Named Public Facilities, Directed Award of Congressional Gold Medals, etc:  45**

This means that, in two years, the 118th Congress passed 113 pieces of legislation that - for better or worse - directly affected some segment of the American people. That works out to roughly 56 laws per year, or 5 per month.

Five pieces of meaningful legislation per month doesn't seem like very much, considering that each member of Congress has a staff of people to help with the research and writing, plus the resources of the Library of Congress and the Congressional Research Service, plus countless swarms of lobbyists eager to do the work of writing legislation so that the members don't screw it up. Of course, the relentless demands of political fund-raising, a slothful schedule (on average, 123 working days per year for the House and 144 for the Senate), and the need to bloviate every time the cameras are on eat into the time available for actual legislative work. 

What more can I say?

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Readers, the final Ass Clown Awardee for 2024, the Left-Cheek Ass Clown for December, is the 118th Congress. That grinding noise you hear is the Founders rolling over in their graves.

Have a good day, and come back tomorrow for the last Cartoon Saturday of 2024. More thoughts then.

Bilbo

* Italy has had 69 governments since the end of World War II, each lasting an average of 1.11 years.

** This is my count, which I think is accurate, but which was done by counting lines of small print on four pages of entries using my tired old eyes.