The Huffington Post article focused on another aspect of the 113th Congress: How it compares year-to-date with other Congresses. And the answer is: poorly. Only the 97th and 104th Congresses have been close in terms of pace, but the 113th is still significantly lower in terms of bills signed into law. In part, that's because the Congress has been slow at introducing new bills.

Below is the average number of bills and resolutions introduced each month since the 93rd Congress. The blue line shows the average per month; the red, the cumulative total. (Notice that the graph spans two years, the length of each Congress.)



By the end of June, most Congresses have introduced 7,339 bills and resolutions. This one has introduced 4,510 to date. Take fewer bills introduced, multiply it by a lower percentage of passage, and you get a historic low.

And now we get to the part where you take the blame. Congresses don't work in a vacuum, of course. There are two chambers that need to pass a bill and a president that needs to sign it into law. So we took a look at how the composition of a Congress compares to the laws enacted. The chart below shows three data points. The yellow is easy; it's the number of bills enacted as in the first graph. The red and blue lines, however, take some explaining. Each shows the percentage of a chamber of Congress that matched the party of the sitting president. So in 1982, the 97th Congress, there was a Republican president. The Senate had 53 Republicans, so the percentage that year was 53 percent. The theory being: if a party holds a majority in each chamber plus the presidency, more bills should be passed into law. Anytime the red (House) or blue (Senate) line climbs above the 50 percent line below, it means that the president has a majority in that chamber.

