2 January—Section 2 of the 20^th Amendment to the Constitution: “The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3d day of January, unless they shall by law appoint a different day.” They’ve regularly appointed a different day through the years for any number of reasons, but since the 115^th Congress in 2017 3 January has been it.

So the 118^th Congress convened 3 January 2023 and, since it has to make way for the 119^th Congress, it will adjourn before noon tomorrow. At its adjournment it will have enacted some 209 public laws and no private laws. Private laws apply to specific people or groups rather than the general public. President Joe Biden vetoed 13 bills passed by the 118^th Congress, by the way, and his veto wasn’t overridden on a single one. They didn’t even try. For obvious reasons.

So what? So what may seem like a lot of new laws is actually the fewest passed by any congress for three decades. For example, the 117^th Congress enacted 362 public laws and three private laws; the 116^th Congress enacted 344 public laws; the 115^th Congress enacted 442 public laws, one private law, and ratified six treaties.

What, you may wonder, can all those laws be about? Assume that most are superfluous and in the political self-interest of individual representatives and senators. But that doesn’t matter for this disquisition, since it’s the quantity of legislation rather than the quality or the purpose that’s taking criticism.

Hard as it may be for rational people to believe, the 118^th Congress is actually being trashed by critics—all from the left, as far as we can determine—as the least productive or the most unproductive in the history of the republic. Evidently legislative productivity is to be categorized—judged—like mass production of cars or sausages. In all events, the criticism should be taken as a compliment.

The question that should be asked, of course, is how much legislation passed by the 118^th Congress—how much legislation enacted by any legislature and administration at any time, for that matter—is really needed? That’s not a rhetorical question. And the only rational answer is not much.

Critics on the left and right of the 118^th Congress complain that both houses wasted too much time in partisan bickering. Sure there’s been a considerable amount of purely partisan belligerence in recent sessions. But that’s what Congress has been about since the first one. And on the bright side, it’s kept our excremental politicians from enacting even more unnecessary, often counterproductive legislation for their own benefit . . .