Pew says the 119th Congress is among the least productive of the past 40 years. I only have the headline, so I can’t tell you how they counted. Laws passed, probably. But I keep thinking about the short list of things this Congress did finish in recent weeks: it sent a bill to end penny production, and it passed a Russia sanctions bill. It also blocked a stock-trading ban on its own members, which counts as productivity of a kind.

A legislature that can retire the one-cent coin and cannot restrict its own portfolios is telling you something about which decisions are cheap. The penny has no constituency. Nobody has to cast a vote they’d regret in October.

Meanwhile the work of governing didn’t stop. It moved. The administration clawed back $810 million Congress had already appropriated, and a judge had to order taxpayer-funded ads off the air. Anything this Congress declines to do, someone else does for it, and then the courts sort out whether that was allowed. Dysfunction here is less an absence of government than a transfer of it, from the body that has to win elections to the ones that don’t.

There’s a Washington Post piece making the rounds arguing that Congress’s behavior is “actually rational” given its incentives. I believe it. That may be the most unsettling part. A body acting sensibly for each member, one at a time, can still add up to a body that mostly abolishes coins.

I wonder what the November version of this stat looks like if the House flips.

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