Finding 60 votes in an evenly divided Senate? A high bar, but not an impossible one
The current Senate has managed to clear the 60-vote hurdle to avoid a filibuster on several of its main legislative achievements.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The current Senate has managed to clear the 60-vote hurdle to avoid a filibuster on several of its main legislative achievements.
The 117th Congress’ total legislative output stands at 36 laws – only 30 of which count, by our criteria, as substantive legislation.
No lame-duck session in the nearly 5 decades for which data is available has been as legislatively productive as that of the 116th Congress.
Americans voted in record numbers in last year’s presidential election, casting nearly 158.4 million ballots.
While the 115th Congress was more legislatively active than its recent predecessors, the proportion of substantive to ceremonial legislation was much the same.
Most Americans like labor unions, at least in the abstract. A majority (55%) holds a favorable view of unions, versus 33% who hold an unfavorable view, according to a Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year. Despite those fairly benign views, unionization rates in the United States have dwindled in recent decades. As of 2017, just 10.7% of all wage and salary workers were union members, matching the record low set in 2016, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The vast majority of proposed amendments die quiet, little-mourned deaths in committees and subcommittees.
Congress passed 113 laws, 87 of them substantive, in 2015, making it the most productive first session since 2009.
Legislative productivity may be on an upswing, as lawmakers enacted more bills before their August break than either of the two preceding Congresses.
The American public’s generally favorable view of labor unions hasn’t stopped, or even slowed, union membership’s long decline.
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