It has been a bit over 3 months since I did my last “Congressional Velocity” comparison between the 113th congress and the 112th (and 111th) back in June. So time to do it again.

Specifically though, I was prompted by reading an article by Ezra Klein about the current congressional standoffs headlined “John Boehner’s Congress is a train wreck“. It seems like it probably is. I have no quibbles about that, but Klein also included this bit:

The data tells the same story. So far, the 113th Congress has passed 36 public laws. For comparison, the 112th Congress — the least productive Congress since we began keeping records — passed 283 public laws. At this rate, the 113th Congress is on track to be, by far, the least productive Congress on record.

And here I quibble. Not in the way Boehner does, saying this isn’t a good metric. But just to point out that actually, at this very moment, the 113th is actually AHEAD of where the 112th was at the comparable time. Lets look at the charts:

The 113th WAS on pace to be slower than the 112th… until August 9th, when the president signed 9 bills into law, and the 113th pulled ahead. The 113th has kept that “lead” since then.

Unless there were some laws signed in the last few days that aren’t posted on the White House website or my usual source at congress-summary.com yet, as of September 22nd, the 113th Congress is responsible for 36 public laws, while at the same point in 2011, the 112th had only managed 31.

Now, they may well fall behind again, they aren’t THAT far ahead after all. Certainly neither the 113th or 112th are anywhere near where the 111th was (67 by this point). But for the moment, “At this rate, the 113th Congress is on track to be, by far, the least productive Congress on record.” isn’t actually quite right. The 112th was slightly worse at this point in the cycle.

At least on this particular metric.

[Minor corrections and wording changes 06:30 UTC.]

In our annual predictions show for 2013 one of the items Ivan and I disagreed on was if the 113th congress would enact laws at a higher or lower velocity than the 112th. (Enact of course meaning passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President.)

So I have started to track that. Here are the charts so far (one with a linear scale, one with a log scale to better show the early detail):

Minus any new laws recently signed that might not have made it to my source at congress-summary.com yet, as of 155 days into each of the three Congresses (that would be June 7th of the first year in all three cases) we have the 111th having 25 laws enacted, the 112th having 17 laws enacted, and the 113th having 13 laws enacted.

It is interesting to note the somewhat similar patterns in the shapes of the curves, indicating that although the velocity may be different, there seems to be a nice pattern to how Congress ramps up, when it takes breaks, when it speeds up and does more, etc. Bursts around holidays and in the lame duck period, lulls during the summer, bigger lull in the run up to elections, etc. (Of course, to really examine this, you’d need to look at more than 3 congresses, the similarities may not bear out with robust scrutiny.)

So far I am correct in my prediction that the 113th would enact fewer laws than the 112th. But there is still plenty of time before the end of the year for this to change and for Ivan to be proven right instead.

At the moment I am not making any statement on if that is a good or a bad thing. :-)