Of course, with control of both sides of the Capitol and the White House, congressional Republicans seemingly have carte blanche to pass whatever legislation they want. So far, though, they’ve only seen nine bills signed into law — which is a number that is still above average, given the slow pace of progress in Congress. (There’s a joke in there somewhere.)

Using data from GovTrack.us, we can see how the 115th Congress stacks up against the preceding 22 (as far back as we have data). We’ve color-coded the lines here. Any red line shows Republicans with control of both sides of Congress; any blue line shows Democratic control. Yellow shows split control. A dashed line before the 115th indicates that the party controlled Congress and the White House.

(Included here are bills signed into law by the president or which were passed by overriding a presidential veto.)

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The Congresses that got the fastest starts were mostly Democratic ones, which we’ll get back to. The 108th Congress, which ran from 2003 to 2004, had unified control and passed more bills faster than the 115th (although not many more and not much faster).

Looking at the average of those preceding 22 congresses, though, the 115th is ahead of the curve.

Over the length of a Congress, there’s a pretty clear pattern that emerges.

Congresses with unified Democratic control of the House and Senate passed more bills than ones controlled by Republicans. Averaging out the number of bills passed by day by control:

It’s important to note that most of the periods of solid Democratic control happened during the 1970s and 1980s, before the current era of polarized partisanship. If we break out the numbers by decade, there’s a clear downward trend.