GOP-Led Senate Passing Bills at Rate Not Seen in Decades

The Senate is off to its best year since 1990 by at least one measure, with more than 30 of its bills having been signed into law by President Obama.

Eighteen months into Republican control of the Senate, the upper chamber has settled into a new normal. The partisan fights remain, and senators aren’t spending much time on the floor debating bills — but they are passing them, and at a surprising cli

All told, including the 31 Senate bills and 42 House-written bills, Congress approved 73 measures that Mr. Obama signed into law from January through the end of June. That’s nearly three times the number of bills approved in the first six months of 2015 and 20 more than in 2014, which was the last year Democrats had control of the Senate.

“The new Republican Congress, under the leadership of Sen. McConnell, operates under a dramatically different approach than the Democrats in the previous Congress,” Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said in a statement. “Sen. McConnell opened the Senate, and despite efforts by the Democrat leadership to block bipartisan legislation, we have returned to a more functioning Senate, and allowed senators to participate in the legislative process. While this isn’t the easy way, it allowed members to have more than dysfunction to show for their time in the Senate.”

Democrats say Congress doesn’t deserve the platitudes. (Read more from “GOP-Led Senate Passing Bills at Rate Not Seen in Decades” HERE)

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