Congressional Moneyball

How effective are your senators? And guess who’s No. 1?
By MOLLY JACKMAN, SAUL JACKMAN and BRIAN BOESSENECKER
 
If the 113th Congress were a sports team, it would be on a record-breaking streak of futility. During the first session, the 113th Congress passed fewer public laws than any other Congress since at least 1947. So which legislators are most to blame for the unprecedented levels of gridlock in the current Congress, and which are trying to solve the problem? Using a series of baseball-inspired statistics, the FixGov team at The Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Managementevaluates which legislators were most productive in 2013, and which let their team down.
For sports fans, few things are more frustrating than watching your team lose game after game (a certain Washington football franchise comes to mind). When this happens, conversations turn to who is to blame and how to fix the problem. Certainly, you inevitably think, if you were the general manager, you could do a better job.
Political junkies find themselves in the same awkward spot today. If the House and Senate were sports teams, their managers would be fired. Of the 5,700 bills introduced across both chambers during the first session of the 113th Congress, only 56—less than 1 percent—became public laws. We expect gridlock in the House, where the majority party’s stronghold on the Rules Committee and speakership enable obstructionism. The Senate, though, has typically been regarded by scholars as dominated by unanimous consent and collaboration between the majority and minority leaders. But, contrary to this expectation, in the 113th Congress, the House was able to pass nearly twice the rate of bills introduced as was the Senate.
Heading into the 2014 midterm elections, voters have the opportunity to act as general managers, choosing who to keep and who to throw out when cleaning house. To evaluate the players in the Senate, in a new series published by the Brookings Institution, we propose a number of baseball-inspired measures of legislative efficiency and effectiveness.
Measuring Senate at-bats, hits, and batting averages
By this analogy, a senator is “at-bat” if she introduces a bill. In this past session, every senator had at least one at-bat, and a total of 1,894 bills were introduced. David Vitter (R-Louis.) led in this category, introducing 61 bills, followed by Mark Begich (D-Ark.) with 49, and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) with 48.
Coming up to bat does little for a team without a hit. Likewise, in the Senate, the introduction of a bill is inconsequential for policy if that bill does not survive the committee gauntlet. Just like reaching first base is the first step toward scoring a run, clearing the committee stage is the first step toward becoming a public law.
Predictably, there are far fewer hits in the Senate than there are at bats, with only 253 bills making it past committee. Leading in hits were Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) with 13 and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) with 11. When we look at this category, then, we begin to understand where the problem lies: even in the traditionally collegial Senate, 87 percent of bills die in committee. While the filibuster may grab all the headlines, committees are a far deadlier weapon.

Molly Jackman and Saul Jackman are Fellows in the Governance Studies Program at The Brookings Institution.
 
Brian Boessenecker holds a political science degree from UCLA.