So here we are, tortured phone owners one and all. Perhaps, like me, you’ve accidentally blocked some of your friends without successfully getting rid of the woman with the free knee brace. Perhaps you were like Dr. Gary Pess, a hand surgeon who told The Times’s Tara Siegel Bernard that he stopped answering any calls when he didn’t recognize the number and then discovered one of them was about a person with a severed thumb.

But good news! We’re getting some action. I know “Congress is working on a bill” is not as encouraging as, say, “Let me pour you a drink and change the subject.” But still.

In the House, Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey has a proposal called Stopping Bad Robocalls, which certainly gets to the point. Pallone is the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce and it’s fair to say he has a healthy chance of getting something done.

Things are more problematic in the Senate, which, as you may have noticed, is barely capable of getting its act together long enough to salute the flag. However, Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts — the man who helped give us that Telephone Consumer Protection Act in 1991 — has teamed up with Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota to sponsor a bipartisan plan. It’s called the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act, which I certainly hope you noticed spells out Traced. (Or, O.K., Traceda if you wanted to be really technical.)

The bill, Markey says, is “a perfect example” of lawmakers from opposite sides of the aisle getting together and “agreeing we don’t want our wireless devices in our pocket to be called by total strangers 10, 15 times a day.”

Pretty low bar, yes? Perhaps someday we will see a liberal from California and a conservative from Arkansas get together to fight against people who throw beer bottles out of their car window when they’re in the passing lane on the highway.

But let’s not be cynical. Markey says, “If this bill can’t pass then no bill can pass,” and he’s probably right. You need to root him on, given that the other option is falling back in your chair and moaning, “No bill can pass.” Come on.

The idea is to make telephone companies try much harder to identify and block slimy robocalls. And to bring enforcement groups together to find new ways to prosecute the scammers. I know it doesn’t sound all that dramatic, but if you want people to stop calling you every day with offers to repay your student loans, it’s a better strategy than repeatedly screaming “I graduated in 1980!” into the phone.

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