VOA – WASHINGTON – Steven Billet worked on Capitol Hill for prominent members of the House of Representatives and then spent 18 years lobbying Congress for a telecommunications company. Now he directs the Legislative Affairs Program at George Washington University. He shakes his head when asked to comment on the state of Congress this past year and says he has never seen it “worse in my lifetime.” Billet says the divisiveness is a reflection of the country as a whole, in a year dominated by the impeachment of President Donald Trump. That discord proved itself in a Congress of inaction for the first 11 months of the year, followed by a whirlwind of votes in December.
An austere beginning
The year stuttered through January with a 35-day, record-setting government shutdown. A Congress fixated on reopening the government did little else. Amid near-constant partisan warfare, freshmen legislators new to Capitol Hill spent hours in political party caucus strategy sessions, sapping time from advancing legislation to benefit their constituents. Instead, they got a crash course in Washington gridlock.
Once the shutdown ended, the president’s annual State of the Union speech appealed for Congress to “break decades of political stalemate.” But that was unlikely to happen with a divided Congress, as Democrats controlled the House and the Republicans controlled the Senate.
Looking back on his first year as a U.S. Representative, Republican Pete Stauber of Minnesota said, ” I think the division [between the parties] was the biggest disappointment.” Stauber said he and his freshmen class of legislators need to lead the way with bipartisan bills and bridging the gap between parties.
As of the December adjournment, Congress passed 101 bills that became law for the year, one of the legislature’s least productive in modern history. Of the 101, a significant proportion dealt with routine governmental operations about which few Americans knew or cared. Many others were minor matters like renaming U.S. post offices for prominent people.
Impeachment adds to impasse
In late September, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi initiated the formal impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump announcing, “No one is above the law.” Subsequent hearings would compound the gridlock and the acrimony on Capitol Hill as Republicans stood behind Trump and Democrats demanded consequences for the president’s alleged misdeeds.
But, in December, as the House was drafting the articles of impeachment, it was simultaneously working to advance one of the President’s key campaign promises — a massive U.S. trade pact with Mexico and Canada, the USMCA — to replace The North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. The House approved the deal in its final vote of the year.