Bills Stalled by Senate, Not House
If you’ve been drowning in a sea of impeachment chatter for a couple of weeks, you’re probably not too concerned about the plastic wading pool of what else the 116th Congress is doing with its time.
The President has repeatedly said that the House of Representatives is so busy investigating that it has done nothing, nada, zilch in the way of law making.
That is not true.
It has done a lot and you may not like the results but many of the bills the House has passed in 2019 have been buried in Mitch McConnell’s graveyard of legislation.
The lawyer (or anyone else) interested in what kind of laws are coming out of the House only to be dead-ended in the upper chamber can look at any number of wholly reliable sources and see what has happened in the 116th Congress.
For example, C-SPAN’s “Congressional Chronicle” lists in painful detail the history of each bill which has made its way through the House and then what happened to it.
You can see in this source that, indeed, the Budget Act became law. Or you can see that the Stopping Robocalls Act was successful in the House in July, but it’s stalled. Or a bill for small businesses was acted on by the lower house on July 9, but nothing’s happened. Ditto for a measure to protect homebuyers that passed the House in early September, but it, too, has not been acted upon in the Senate.
The “Congressional Chronicle” tells you the raw facts about our lawmakers: How many laws were passed in each house in the last several years, how many hours each house has actually been in session each year, etc. They can’t hide from public scrutiny!
Of course, you could try other sources if you don’t trust C-SPAN. There’s LegiScan and there is GovTrac.us. Or you might try Congress.gov.
Anywhere you look you will find that the House is busy passing bills and sending them on to McConnell. As I noted, you may not like all the bills, but, on the other hand, you might want to prod the Senate to act on those you like.
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