Would you like to have a job that gave you 218 days off a year? According to the official calendar put out by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the House of Representatives will only be in session for 147 days in 2017.
And that is actually an increase from last year. In 2016, there were only 131 legislative days for the House. So if you are wondering why Congress never seems to get anything done, this is one of the biggest reasons. The sad truth is that members of Congress simply do not spend a lot of time doing what they were elected to do.
If you are an average American worker with a full-time job, you probably put in around 240 working days a year. If you have to work that hard, why can’t Congress?
And actually things used to be even worse. The New York Times looked back at 2013 once it was done, and they found that the House was only in session for 942 hours for the entire year. When you break that down, it comes to about 18 hours a week.
If you go all the way back to 2006, there were just 104 legislative days in the House. It is almost as if they just decided to take pretty much that whole year off.
Congress gets especially lazy during the summer months. Many Americans don’t realize that every year Congress takes the entire month of August off. And actually, the House will be on vacation from July 29th all the way to September 4th in 2017.
This year, U.S. Senator David Perdue is proposing that the August vacation be canceled because there is so much for Congress to do. According to Senator Perdue, there are five major tasks that need to be accomplished by September 30th…
“First, we have to complete the work on the first phase of repealing Obamacare and fixing our health care system.
“Second, we have to pass a budget resolution that will work within the reconciliation process for changing the tax code.
“Third, we have to use the appropriations process to fund the federal government by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.
“Fourth, we have to deal with our debt limit. The Treasury Department has used extraordinary measures to buy time since the national debt hit its limit of $19.8 trillion in March.
“Fifth, we have to finally act on our once-in-a-generation opportunity to change our archaic tax code, but we will only be able to do so if we achieve the first four priorities.”
If those things don’t get done in time, members of Congress should not expect the voting public to have any sympathy for them.
Full story by Michael Snyder at End of the American Dream
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