An analysis of the activity level of both Houses of Congress by The Washington Times has found that the current Democratic-led Senate produced fewer pieces of legislation than at any time in its recorded history.

The Times is reporting that they used six different yardsticks to measure the legislative activity in the House and Senate: the amount of time each chamber spent officially in session; the total number of bills that passed; the number of floor votes each chamber took; the number of pages amassed in the Congressional Record, which records floor debates; the number of conference reports written; and the number of bills each chamber had signed into law by the president.

Using the Resume of Congressional Activity, which has been in existence since 1947, the Times ranked each chamber on all six of those measures, then compiled that into a “legislative futility” index.

“In 2011, the Senate ranked poorly on all the measures relating to bills and was in the lower half on votes and pages in the record,” the Times found. “The only yardstick by which it performed well was on time spent in session, where it logged more than 1,100 hours — slightly better than the median.”

Combining those rankings gave the Senate a futility score of 70, or 19 points lower than the Senate’s record of 89 established in 2008.

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) blamed Republicans for holding up the works. 

“We’ve spent months on things that used to happen just matter-of-factly,” he said. “I would hope that they understand that everything doesn’t have to be a fight. Legislation is the art of working together, building consensus, compromise.”

When “Meet the Press” moderator David Gregory countered this statement with the fact that the House has been passing legislation, including a budget, which Senate Democrats haven’t accomplished for two years, Sen. Reid continued to point fingers at Republicans, claiming that they were using the Senate’s minority-friendly rules against him.

“The Senate works on consensus,” he said. “And we haven’t been able to get that because the Republicans, I repeat for the third time, I want to make sure everyone understands this: obstructionism on steroids,” he said.

However, the Times‘ analysis suggests that the Senate is an increasingly broken chamber. All five of the worst performances on record were in the past decade, with four of those sessions occurring when Democrats were in control and Republicans were in the minority.

A spokesman for Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-TN) said in a statement that the Democrats’ 2012 agenda appears to be the same as in 2011.

“Legislation that will be pushed will be what polls well, rather than what could feasibly be passed into law,” he said.

The House, which is Republican-led at the present time, received much better grades than the Senate.

“It spent more time in session than all but 10 other congresses, compiled the eighth highest number of pages of debate and took more floor votes than all but two other congresses,” the Times reports.

“But it passed the fewest number of bills in its history and had fewer bills signed by the president than any other Congress and shared the same poor performance on conference reports.”

Overall, it’s futility score came in at 144, making it the 10th worst session since 1947.

The second session of the 112th Congress, which begins today, is not expected to be much better as election year politics brings the usual legislative paralysis.

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