Yesterday, President Bush “derided Democrats for running a do-nothing Congress that has failed to address critical domestic, economic and security issues in the nine months since they took control of Capitol Hill.”

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. “Congressional oversight of the executive branch has intensified under Democratic rule, especially in the House, following years of inattention and deference by their Republican predecessors under unified government.”

Moreover, as ThinkProgress has pointed out, the “110th Congress has had more roll call votes this year than any other Congress in history, almost doubling the number under the previous Congress overseen by Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL).” If Bush has forgotten that he has signed 96 bills into law since the opening of the 110th Congress, then here is a sampling of some of the “do nothing” he has overseen:

- Implementation of the 9-11 Commission recommendations

- Lobbying and ethics reform

- An increase in the minimum wage

- Reform of foreign investment rules

- A competitiveness package encouraging scientific research and innovation

In fact, “the Democratic Congress’s legislative harvest this year has been bountiful compared with that of its Republican counterpart in 1995,” despite Republican attempts to obstruct legislative progress. Bush has vetoed popular legislative initiatives, axing bills expanding children’s health care, timetables to “responsibly redeploy from Iraq” and an expansion of life-saving medical research on stem cells,” while Congressional Republicans have tried to block legislation. According to a July McClatchy report, “1 in 6 roll-call votes in the Senate this year have been cloture votes.”

If this pace of blocking legislation continues, this 110th Congress will be on track to roughly triple the previous record number of cloture votes.

While Democrats should do more to challenge the President on Iraq, public dissatisfaction with Bush’s policies and Republican obstructionism has contributed to the body’s sagging poll numbers. According to a recent Brookings Institution report,”Congress is catching the diffuse blame” for “public discontent with the direction of the country, the war in Iraq, the state of the economy and the performance of the president.”

Democrats correctly point to polling evidence that while Congress as an institution gets low marks, the public also rates the Democrats substantially higher than the Republicans on almost every important public issue and prefers to maintain the current majority in power.

It seems that the American public would rather Republicans “do nothing” than obstruct the Democratic agenda.

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