As President Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar legislative agenda has foundered in the Senate, pundits and insiders have proposed a new tack meant to revive his sagging poll numbers: He and Congressional Democrats need to brag more.

Journalist Juan Williams bluntly suggested “Mr. President, it is time to drop the nice guy act. Start bellowing and boasting. Yes, start acting like Trump.” Former Clinton adviser Paul Begala similarly proposed that Biden resort to “bragging and blaming” to revive his fortunes. And you could tell the guidance found its way to the top of the political heap when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Biden and Democrats need to “brag more about what we have been doing” — including ironically about their now-stalled Build Back Better plan.

For his part, President Biden has tried bragging about job creation, saying last week that “history has been made here” as a result of the over six million jobs created in his first year in office. Naturally, he omitted the fact that those jobs were expected even without his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which he previously suggested would result in millions of additional jobs that are nowhere to be found.

Beyond job creation, Juan Williams specifically suggested
touting last fall’s infrastructure law, saying: “Oh,
and please send up fireworks for the bipartisan infrastructure law Biden
signed that invests over $1 trillion in repairing and rebuilding America’s
ailing infrastructure — the roads, bridges, and ports.”

How do such “fireworks” play out on Capitol
Hill? Apparently in lots of hearings. You can tell congressional leadership has
put out the ABP to committees by the recent surge in hearings about taking
credit for what one calls the “benefits” of the infrastructure law. Here’s the
current roster of announced House hearings on that topic:

• February 9: House Select Committee on the Economy hearing on “Connecting Americans to Prosperity: How Infrastructure Can Bolster Inclusive Economic Growth”
• February 15: House Ways and Means Select Revenue Measures Subcommittee hearing on “Examining the Economic Impact of Federal Infrastructure Investment”
• February 15: House Small Business Subcommittee on Underserved, Agricultural, and Rural Business Development hearing on “The infrastructure Investment and Jobs Acts Benefits for Small Businesses”

The Senate has scheduled a March 2 hearing by the Environment and Public Works Committee on the “implementation of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act by the Department of Transportation” — which is currently the only announced Senate hearing that week.

Hearings are an
important part of what Congress does —
the official face of legislative and other committees’ efforts to review problems,
collect expert testimony, and build support for potential solutions. Most hearings
are forward looking and designed to build public support for future legislation.
Others fall into the “oversight” category — often reviewing the failings of an agency or
program to meet expectations.

Lawmakers who are busy crafting new legislation usually don’t have time for celebratory hearings about recently enacted policies. But with “Democrats’ social spending dreams stuck in winter purgatory,” as Politico put it this week, that looks to be what Congress will spend more time doing in the coming days.

Instead of marking time bragging about past bills, Congress would better serve taxpayers if it tried to perform its basic legislative responsibilities on time for a change. As my AEI colleague Jim Capretta has noted, Capitol Hill legislators haven’t enacted all annual appropriations bills on time since 1997, which is an extraordinary spell of dysfunction even for Congress (the youngest member of the House was two years old the last time Congress passed all its spending bills by the start of the fiscal year). In the House, that period includes Republican majorities (from 1998–2006 and 2011–2018) and Democratic majorities (from 2007–2010 and 2019 to today). So the blame falls on both parties for what has become an annual tradition of passing end-of-year megabills laden with spending policies few members have even read — which is certainly nothing to brag about.

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