Charting Legislative Efficiency in Congress
In a recent visualization by The Economist, the productivity of the U.S. Congress from 1947 to 2023 is illustrated, shedding light on the number of major bills passed in each session. The visualization, however, does not specify the party affiliations of these major bills or the content they entail.
The 117th Congress, which concluded in 2023, passed a total of 12 major bills, as per the visualization. Interestingly, only five of these bills received bipartisan support. The remaining seven bills did not secure such cross-party backing, and they are represented as turquoise in the visualization.
The visualization also provides a snapshot of the party control in each session of Congress. It displays the party that held control over the House, Senate, and presidency during each session, offering insights into the political landscape during the passage of these major bills.
However, it is important to note that the visualization does not indicate which bills were passed with majorities in the House and Senate but not the other. Furthermore, it does not specify the number of major bills passed in previous Congress sessions.
Historically, bipartisan support in Congress has fluctuated considerably over time, with earlier decades generally seeing more frequent bipartisan cooperation compared to recent years. Major legislation often requires some degree of cross-party support, but the exact number of such bills versus partisan bills over more than 70 years is not typically summarized in publicly available sources.
To obtain precise figures on the number of major bills passed with bipartisan support versus without, from 1947 to 2023, one would need to consult specialized political science databases or analyses from organizations that track Congressional vote patterns and bill sponsorship, such as the Congressional Research Service, the Brookings Institution, or legislative analytics platforms.
In conclusion, while The Economist's visualization offers a valuable overview of the productivity of the U.S. Congress, it does not provide detailed information about the bipartisan support for individual major bills passed in the 117th Congress. For a comprehensive understanding of bipartisan support in Congress over the years, more in-depth research and analysis would be required.
AI technology, when used, could analyze data from various sources such as political science databases, the Congressional Research Service, the Brookings Institution, or legislative analytics platforms, to identify the number of major bills passed with bipartisan support versus without, from 1947 to 2023. Cloud-computing, being a crucial part of data management, would facilitate the storage and processing of these vast amounts of data in an efficient manner. Such insight could contribute to general news and political discourse by offering a more comprehensive understanding of bipartisan support in Congress over the years.
