Blame Harry Reid for DC Gridlock

That's the gist of a Brookings Institution report released this month. Couched in baseball sports terms, the left-leaning think tank found that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (pictured) and his Democratic Senate committee chairmen killed the vast majority of legislation in the 113th Congress. "If the House and Senate were sports teams, their managers would be fired," wrote the authors of the report in a Politico article.

Per the Washington Examiner:

The analysis opens with the observation that the House, contrary to expectation, passed twice as many bills as the Senate in 2013. Why? Because of the Senate committee process.

"When we look at this category, then, we begin to understand where the problem lies: even in the traditionally collegial Senate, 87 percent of bills die in committee," Molly Jackman and Saul Jackman, of Brookings, and Brian Boessenecker write in Politico. "While the filibuster may grab all the headlines, committees are a far deadlier weapon."

That observation undermines the conventional wisdom about Republican opposition to President Obama causing gridlock...

Investor's Business Daily editors were more direct:

The Brookings scholars note that the 113th Congress passed just 56 bills out of the 5,700 introduced, making it the least productive of any since 1947.

What they found, however, was that the Republican-run House actually passed bills at nearly twice the rate as the Senate under Harry Reid's leadership.

"The Senate," the authors wrote, "is not serving its intended function." And that's not because Senate Republicans keep filibustering bills."  [snip]

So if you want to grouse about Washington gridlock, direct your post cards, letters, emails or phone calls to the real cause: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.