A Look Back at the Highs and Lows of the 114th Congress

When the Senate voted to pass a water infrastructure and drought relief bill shortly after 1 a.m. on Saturday December 10, it essentially marked the conclusion of the 114th Congress and shifted the nation’s political focus toward the transition into the Trump administration and the next Congress.

Fewer bills have been signed into law under the 114th Congress at this point than in any of its predecessors since the Civil War, and while there are reasons for that — divided government and a presidential election cycle chief among them — lawmakers did pass 255 bills into law, and that number may still rise. With that in mind, we’ve recapped some of the major legislation that became law, and the high profile proposals that didn’t get enacted.

What got done?

The 114th Congress convened on January 6, 2015 with an early deadline. Its first order of business was to pass a so-called "Doc Fix" to prevent doctors’ reimbursement rates under Medicare from being slashed when an existing fix expired. Lawmakers ultimately approved a two-year patch in April 2015, but after passing 17 of these short-term fixes in an 11-year span, some had hoped for a longer-term solution. (The next Congress will have to pass another “Doc Fix,” which will bring the tally to 19 in 13 years.)

Several key provisions in the PATRIOT Act, including the controversial Section 215, were set to expire at the end of May 2015, but Congress wasn’t able to pass a reform bill known as the USA FREEDOM Act until early June, so there was a brief lapse in surveillance authorities. The bill ended the bulk collection of phone records at the National Security Agency (NSA) and gave companies the ability to challenge gag orders that prevent them from publicly disclosing requests for information from government agencies. These provisions will be up for reauthorization again in December 2019.

Spring 2015 also saw Congress require President Obama to give them the text of the Iran nuclear agreement so that lawmakers could review and vote on the deal. While the bill — which was originally about health insurance for volunteer firefighters — passed with wide bipartisan support, Congress never voted on a resolution to reject the deal, so it was allowed to proceed.

Congress granted President Obama a "fast-track" for approving free trade agreements in June 2015 after brokering a deal to also improve the enforcement of trade deal terms. But while the fast-track process was planned to help the Trans-Pacific Partnership approval process, Congress never considered the TPP after its terms were finalized.

After enacting several short-term extensions of the Highway Trust Fund in 2015, Congress was able to reach an agreement on a six-year bill known as the DRIVE Act to fund the nation’s transportation infrastructure projects through 2021. That dealmaking foreshadowed a larger bipartisan agreement that would ultimately cause a big shakeup in Congressional leadership.

With the federal government on track to run out of funding at the end of September 2015, Congress passed a short-term fix to keep it funded into December. In the meantime, a bipartisan budget deal was reached in October, which outlined top-level spending for the 2016 fiscal year. The terms of that deal upset enough House Republicans that they voted House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) out of the speakership. Boehner retired from Congress shortly thereafter, and was replaced as speaker by Paul Ryan (R-WI).

Unfortunately, the matter of how that funding would actually be spent still had to be determined, and Congress had to give itself additional deadline extensions before an omnibus appropriations bill that laid out $1.1 trillion in spending could be enacted on December 17, 2015.

For the 114th Congress’s 2016 session, the legislative calendar lightened as lawmakers took time away from Capitol Hill to hit the campaign trail in the hope of keeping their jobs. But they did manage to pass a few significant bipartisan bills when they weren’t kissing babies and raising campaign cash.

One such bill was an overhaul of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law known as the Every Student Succeeds Act, which gave states greater power in designing how their school systems prepare students for college or careers. Another was the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which let the survivors of terror attacks and the families of victims sue foreign governments that sponsored or otherwise helped the perpetrators. Despite being vetoed by Obama, Congress had sufficient majorities in the House and Senate to override the veto, so it became law anyways. To date, that’s the only time an Obama veto has been overridden.

At the end of September 2016, the funding provided by the omnibus at the end of 2015 ran out, which required Congress to pass another short-term continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government into December while also providing $1.1 billion in long-awaited Zika funding.

That set up a chaotic conclusion to the 114th Congress, with lawmakers scrambling to pass another funding bill before ending the session and transitioning into the new Congress. They also felt obliged to deal with a bill that had been under debate since spring 2015, known as the 21st Century Cures Act. Over 18 months after it was introduced, the bill passed in an amended form on a bipartisan 94-5 vote.

Following the election, President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team requested that Congress not set spending levels for the entire 2017 fiscal year, instead only funding the government into the spring so that the new administration could quickly make their mark on the workings of the federal government.

With a shutdown looming, the House passed a CR to fund the government into April and a water bill that funds infrastructure projects, gives communities like Flint, Michigan money to deal with lead-tainted water systems, and provide drought relief to California before leaving town to let the Senate finish Congress’s business. Some procedural maneuvers by Democrats hoping to amend the bills to boost healthcare benefits for coal miners and protect endangered fish that may be harmed by drought relief provisions delayed the Senate until a shutdown was imminent. But ultimately, the CR passed late Friday night and the water bill followed suit in the wee hours of Saturday December 10, which ended up being the final vote of the session as the shutdown was averted.

What didn’t get done?

As expected, Republicans in Congress tried yet again to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and the result was as unsuccessful their previous efforts. And despite support on both sides of the aisle for authorizing the use of military force against ISIS, neither the president’s proposal, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) bill, nor a broader authorization that included additional Islamist terror groups were approved.

Following the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, the nation’s highest court was left with a vacancy and Obama nominated Merrick Garland as his replacement. But the Senate refused to hold confirmation hearings for Garland, despite pleas from the House and many others, insisting that the next president should be responsible for nominating a new justice.

Following an attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida by gun-toting terrorists that killed 49, four gun control measures were proposed as amendments to an appropriations bill, which sought to offer solutions from each party that would prevent suspected terrorists from buying guns and expand background checks. All four amendments failed to receive the 60 votes they needed to be adopted.

What could still get done?

Congress may be gone, but there are still 75 bills that it passed which are still awaiting President Obama’s signature and could become law. Among those are several recently passed bills, including the water projects and drought relief bill that got the last vote of the session, an extension of sanctions against Iran, and the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017.

Here’s how the 114th Congress compared to some of its recent predecessors in terms of bills becoming law.
(As of December 15, 2016)

Want to praise or criticize your lawmakers for their efforts in the 114th Congress? You can do that or tell them what bills they should consider in the next Congress using the "Take Action" button.

— Eric Revell

Chart by Jason Weingardt

(Photo by Pete Souza, White House)