WASHINGTON — For just the first time in six years, Congress gave final approval to its annual budget resolution Tuesday — the latest in a slow but steady churn of progress that suggests maybe the new boss isn’t the same as the old boss.
Later this week the Senate likely could pass a bipartisan bill to set up a congressional review of a potential nuclear deal with Iran, coming on the heels of a large bipartisan vote in the House and Senate for a bill to combat sex trafficking. A little over two weeks ago, the bipartisan leadership held a back-slapping ceremony to celebrate a new law that eliminated cuts to Medicare reimbursements for doctors.
“This Senate is dramatically different than the last one in several measurable ways,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in an interview last week.
What Republicans tout as a sea change, however, Democrats view as a new Congress merely passing the low-hanging fruit of legislation, and even that can still look dysfunctional.
Two months ago there was a near-shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, and it took more than a month to approve the legislation creating a fund for sex trafficking victims. Both of those largely bipartisan issues got caught up in separate contentious issues that bogged down the Capitol for weeks and weeks.
The process has left some rank-and-file lawmakers saying that they’ve seen some substantial progress, only to see a return to old habits.
“I think the jury is out,” said Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats and has been trying to bridge the partisan divide. “There are several other bills sort of waiting in line. We may end up being pretty productive, but I think it’s a little early to say at this point.”
There’s no question that more is happening across the Capitol. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has adapted into a PowerPoint presentation the work of undergraduate students from Harvard, showing that more bills were introduced in the House during the first 100 days than in the same time of 2011 and 2013.
Moreover, the House passed 62 bills in its first 100 days, more than the combined total in the first 100 days of 2011 and 2013. “With your help, things are different in Washington,” McCarthy wrote to his GOP colleagues on Friday.
Of those 62 bills approved by the House, eight were signed into law. That’s not much different than the seven signed into law in the first 100 days of 2011 when Democrats controlled the Senate and Republicans ran the House.
One of those laws, the Medicare reimbursement plan was significant because it included some changes to the program as well as an extension of a popular children insurance program. The rest were largely ceremonial or extensions of existing laws.
McConnell acknowledged that he has dialed back his expectations for big bipartisan accomplishments in the final two years of President Obama’s administration. He has, for example, cast aside hope for a comprehensive revision of the tax code.
“I can’t see it being done, which is a shame, because it would be a perfect thing to tackle in the time of divided government,” McConnell said. “But I’m very skeptical that we can go forward on that.”
Instead, the new focus is “emphasizing things worth doing that enjoy some bipartisan support,” McConnell said. He is going through a series of one-on-one meetings with Democrats to get to know them and their priorities better. McConnell recently huddled with Sen. Timothy Kaine, D-Va., and has an upcoming sit-down with King.
Just a third of the way into this year, McConnell declined to give himself a full grade until the two-year Congress is complete. “I think it’s too early to make that evaluation but I think on the dysfunction issue, I think it is not too early to make an evaluation of that,” he said.
Passing the budget is an example of easing the dysfunction. Not since 2009, when Democrats controlled Congress, have the House and Senate approved annual budgets and then reconciled the differences to pass a joint resolution from which the two chambers could work the rest of the year.
A key example of dissipating gridlock came last week when Obama signed a modest energy efficiency bill into law written by a bipartisan pair of swing-state senators, Democrat Jean Shaheen of New Hampshire and Republican Rob Portman of Ohio.
In 2013 and 2014, facing a very difficult reelection, Shaheen wanted to pass the legislation to demonstrate her effectiveness. The legislation made it onto the Senate floor only to get bogged down by Republican demands for amendments on other energy issues, including the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.
Democrats, with many incumbents facing tough 2014 elections, shielded their incumbents from taking tough votes, so the Shaheen-Portman bill died. After Democrats lost the majority, the bill was approved unanimously at the tail end of a marathon budget marathon at 4 a.m. March 27.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who spent the previous two years trying to negotiate between McConnell and the Democratic leader, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, said basic politics has forced each side to stand down on some previously partisan stands.
“McConnell, as much or more than anyone, realized that we can’t go to the voters in 2016 with a record along the lines of what just happened in the last six years,” McCain said.
Some see the House as the continually unsteady pressure cooker of Congress. Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., a leading centrist, said he was losing faith in the first two months of the year with the focus on social issues, culminating in the near shutdown of DHS over immigration, but the next two months were relatively stable.
On Thursday, however, the House voted largely on party lines to strike down a Washington D.C. law that banned discrimination against residents who use abortion services, a social issue that was reminiscent of the first few weeks in January. “Here we go again,” Dent said.
Some lawmakers see success in tackling some big issues, such as the legislation to have a review of the potential Iranian deal, while major ones like drafting a new war resolution for Iraq have been avoided.
“As long as we’ve got a war going on — nine months into the war come May 8, with no debate on the floor of either body — I’m not going to concede that we are shouldering our responsibilities,” Kaine said. “I’m seeing some positive signs, but we’ve got a war going on.”