WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spent the Senate's last day in session in 2013 in the hospital due what doctors diagnosed as exhaustion.
The 74-year old Nevada Democrat works hard, but he might appreciate the irony of being fatigued by presiding over half of what was by most accounts, including his own, the least productive year of Congress in history.
Reid is exhausted by failing to legislate.
In the first of its two years the 113th Congress passed fewer than 60 bills, far less than the 395 passed by what President Harry Truman called the "Do Nothing Congress" of 1947.
It's less than the 90 bills passed in 2011, when a Republican takeover of the House left a divided Congress that set the previous mark for dysfunction.
It's less than the 125 laws passed in 1995, the year after the Republican Revolution left Newt Gingrich's House battling President Bill Clinton.
Americans have noticed. Job approval ratings for Congress in 2013 averaged 14%, the lowest annual average in Gallup's history Congress started 2013 with a New Year's deal on the so-called fiscal cliff that raised taxes on higher incomes while extending lower rates for the rest of Americans. Excepting the modest budget deal at year's end, it was downhill from there.
Republicans' desire to kill Obamacare, and inability to do so, led to a government shutdown.
The chambers could not agree on a farm bill governing agriculture and a food stamp program that benefits millions. The House never came close to considering a comprehensive immigration bill the Senate passed.
Lawmakers left town this month without confirming Janet Yellen as chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, one of the country's most important jobs. They also didn't extend federal unemployment benefits, which means more than 1 million jobless people are losing assistance.
"Congress is finishing this year less popular than a cockroach, and this kind of mindless, knee-jerk obstruction from Republicans is exactly why," Reid said.
Lawmakers' lack of production was highlighted by their schedules. Both will top 200 days out of session this year. The House spent less than 950 hours in session, the least in modern memory.
Why not? Since both chambers devoted most days they were in town to bills they knew the other chamber would ignore, more time wouldn't have helped much.
Despite talk of a "broken Congress," lawmakers' lackluster productivity stems mostly from the divided Congress. A Republican House continually pushed rightward by Tea Party insurgents and the Democratic-led Senate could not agree on much of anything.
Donald Ritchie, the official Senate historian, noted how both houses produced a lot of bills this year.
"The explanation seems less institutional than electoral," Ritchie said.
As recently as 2009-2010, when Democrats ran the show, Congress was highly productive, despite GOP opposition to most of the bills.