(The sessions themselves averaged 30.25 calendar days, or 4% of a two-year congressional term, though legislative business wasn’t transacted on every day.)īut those averages obscure considerable variation in lame-duck productivity, which can be measured in several ways.
#Lame duck crash full#
Looking at the eight full lame duck sessions that were held between 19, on average they accounted for about 18% of the legislative output of their respective Congresses. Those figures are up compared with recent history. In 2010, the 99 public laws passed during the 111th Congress’ lame duck session accounted for 25.8% of all that Congress’ laws (and 29.2% of its substantive laws). The last Congress’ lame duck, which stretched from November 2012 past New Year’s Day 2013, passed only 87 public laws, but that was 30.7% of the Congress’ entire two-year output and 31.3% of its substantive output (that is, excluding post-office renamings, National “fill-in-the-blank” Week designations and other purely ceremonial legislation). Our analysis found that lame duck sessions are shouldering more of the legislative workload than they used to. We wondered, how productive are these lame duck sessions, and is the “lame” part of the tag deserved? Among the items on the congressional to-do list: keeping the government funded, extending an assortment of expired tax breaks, and voting on nominees for ambassadorships, judgeships and other offices.
Congress is back from its Thanksgiving break to continue its “lame duck” session - so called because it includes senators and representatives who lost their seats in last month’s elections but whose terms won’t expire till January.
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