Along with record low approval ratings, the current Congress is set to earn another dubious distinction: least productive Congress in recent history. According to the Huffington Post, only 219 bills from the 112th Congress have been signed into law.

By comparison, that’s over a hundred less than the current record holder for Least Productive Congress (104th, 1995-1996), with records going back to the 1940′s. The 111th and 110th Congresses have gotten  383 and 460 bills signed into law, respectively.

Norm Ornstein, who called this Congress the worst ever back in July 2011 and has continued to track its problems, also notes that the Senate has failed to  confirm “135 presidential nominations to executive posts and 35 nominations to judgeships that were languishing… unconfirmed, for more than six months.” These included several key positions, not to mention the recent fights over Susan Rice and Chuck Hagel.

Of course, as Gawker commentor Flowbee Bryant points out, many of these representatives are in fact doing the job they were elected to do. The Tea Party pushed an extreme view of “small government,” and they delivered. And as numbers whiz Nate Silver concludes at his FiveThirtyEight blog, an unprecedented amount of representatives are coming from “landslide” districts, that lean either heavily Republican or Democrat (and are often gerrymandered). These representatives don’t have to responded to a politically diverse constituency; and the number of centrist districts are shrinking, too.

So maybe we don’t want this Congress being too active. They could mandate chastity belts for all single women, and appoint Herman Cain as Secretary of the Treasury.

What do you think?

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