(Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)With only four exceptions, every new Congress that arrived in Washington from 1901 to 1953 saw one party controlling the House, the Senate and the White House. That held in the 1960s, too, with Democrats not only holding unified control of Washington but even a 60-plus-vote majority in the Senate. It makes intuitive sense that when one party controls the entire apparatus for passing legislation, more legislation would be passed. Since 1973, Congresses in which there was unified party control enacted an average of 541 new laws. The number of laws enacted in that Congress trended downward, but it had in the 2005-2006 Congress, too.

Source: Washington Post January 03, 2019 21:45 UTC