I was searching for terms to use in finding out what laws that were passed were primarily backed by the Republicans or Democrats. I first searched in our current year, 2022. One of the first things that popped up was, “Almost 95 percent of bills passed in 2022 received bipartisan support.” The group that posted it is “https://senatedemocrats.wa.gov/blog.” It only took one Republican voting for the bill for this blog to consider it having “bipartisan support.” That’s an extremely low bar. It’s also optimistic. I guess you could say the Democrats are optimists.
I tried using the search term “Bills sponsored by the Republican Party,” and turned up this website “https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/subjects/republican_party/1926.” The very first sentence on the website is “Use this page to browse bills in the U.S. Congress related to the subject Republican Party, as determined by the Library of Congress.” I changed the “Republican Party” to “Democratic Party” and it produced the same website, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/subjects/democratic_party/1883, with only the party name changed. This looks like an excellent website that’s without bias since it’s only tracking what each party sponsored.
Both websites agree that there were 312,679 bills introduced. Trying to figure out how many bills actually passed is something I’ll leave up to you. It says that there were 16,843 bills “Agreed To [by] (Simple Resolution). The majority of them would be the funding of government departments from the FTC to the FCC. What is clear is that only a small percentage of the number of bills introduced are actually passed in any one legislative session.
It’s going to take me some time to sort out the other types of bills. Do you remember the bill that got one Republican vote? It was a bill to ensure the right of all women to contraceptive means. The Republicans labeled it “as ‘Trojan horse’ for abortion.” That may seem like a strange comment for the Republicans to make. However, they have been advocating for the Catholic church’s point of view on abortion. This is also the point of view of some evangelical churches. It’s a religious debate because it is based on when someone thinks the “soul” enters the child.
Please stick with me as I try to sort out what bills help middle-class Americans. It would seem like birth control would help young families, but religion says sex should be practiced only for the conception of a child.
