The U.S. Senate apparently cannot be bothered to do their jobs, clocking in the least amount of days at the chamber since 1956, according to Politico.
It seems that the only bill they have managed to pass is one extending Summer Fridays on Capitol Hill indefinitely: the Senate hasn’t had one single Friday vote in all of 2016, and is slated to spend a total of 124 days in session – equating to a 2.9 day workweek, according to Gawker‘s calculations.
It’s also worth mentioning that members of the Senate are salaried with no exceptions, meaning that they are paid for all of the Mondays and Fridays spent smoking Cubans on the putting green.
With a grueling work schedule that begins late Monday evening and ends early Thursday afternoon, the Senate has proven itself as a viable career option for slacker, basement-dweller types in search of a fairly low maintenance part-time gig.
The art of not doing work
The findings confirm suspicions that the Senate has devolved into a purely ornamental, albeit expensive, governing body, and makes a mockery of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s claim that the chamber is “back to work.”
Like college seniors before him, McConnell has seemingly perfected the art of pretending to do work while actually watching music videos on the Internet, crafting a cunning legislative persona that merely gives off the impression of actually accomplishing something.
Senate leaders have pulled the “quality, not quantity” card, alleging that their few sessions are well-intentioned and sufficiently productive. They have rewritten transportation, Medicare and energy laws, instated a long-term highway law and passed roughly 200 bills since assuming control, according to Politico.
But remember: It takes two political parties to slow a national governing body down to a grinding halt. Senate Democrats have pulled the filibuster card on more than one occasion, playing a crucial role in achieving the Senate’s overarching goal of doing nothing.
Cutting the bullshit
But not everyone in Washington is cool with the four-day weekends and 10-day recesses.
House representative David Young (R-Ia.) even went as far as penning a letter to the House Chief Administrative Officer asking that payment be withheld until a budget deal is reached following their failure to do so by the April 15 deadline.
Young claimed that reaching a budget deal is a “key part of the job,” and that legislators shouldn’t get paid if they don’t do their job, according to The Atlantic.
His request was rejected, with the House Chief Administrative Officer citing the 27th amendment, which allows payment revisions to take effect only after the subsequent election.
But the idea of withholding pay in an effort to override political gridlock is nothing new: Young also supported representative Rob Wittman’s No Budget, No Pay Act, which proposes that members should have to kiss their paychecks goodbye if they fail to meet that April 15 deadline.
This so-called “pay-for-performance” system has failed to gain any real traction in Congress, leaving Young to do the unthinkable: withhold his own salary.
“I’ve had a Plan B to make sure we do the right thing,” said Young, referring to his decision to open an escrow account for all of his future paychecks. “I can’t touch it!”
Our take
With the exception of Young and squad, Republicans and Democrats only seem to agree on one thing: Compromises are overrated. The resulting political gridlock has chipped away at any and all means of productivity in Washington over the past few years, putting both parties at a legislative standstill.
Until both can agree to stop forfeiting legislative productivity in the name of advancing their own political agendas, we’ll most likely see similar situations play out across governing bodies.
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Header photo: Alex Wong / Getty
