113th Congress: Shutdown, Nuclear Option, and Landmark Laws

The 113th Congress sat from January 2013 to January 2015 under divided control, with Republicans holding the House 234–201 and Democrats running the Senate with 53 seats plus two independents who caucused with them, against 45 Republicans.¹² It enacted 296 laws, narrowly avoiding the title of least productive Congress in modern tracking, and its two years were dominated by a 16-day government shutdown, a near-breach of the debt ceiling, a rewrite of Senate filibuster rules, and several landmark investigations.³

Who Ran It

John Boehner of Ohio began his second term as Speaker of the House. Eric Cantor of Virginia was Majority Leader, Kevin McCarthy of California was Majority Whip, and Nancy Pelosi led the Democratic minority with Steny Hoyer as her whip.¹ In the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada served as Majority Leader and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky as Minority Leader.⁴

The lineup shifted in June 2014 when Cantor lost his Republican primary to Dave Brat, a college professor backed by Tea Party activists. It was the first time a sitting House majority leader had ever been defeated in a primary.⁵ Cantor stepped down from leadership on July 31, 2014. House Republicans elected McCarthy to replace him and Steve Scalise of Louisiana to take over as whip.⁶

The October 2013 Shutdown and Debt Ceiling Standoff

Fiscal year 2014 began on October 1, 2013, with no appropriations in place. At the peak of the disruption roughly 850,000 federal employees were furloughed, and the government stayed closed for 16 days.⁷ The trigger was a House Republican demand to attach provisions defunding the Affordable Care Act to any spending bill, which Senate Democrats refused.⁸

The Treasury Department warned it would exhaust its ability to manage the $16.699 trillion federal debt by October 17 without a raise in the statutory debt limit.⁹ House Republicans eventually dropped the ACA defunding provisions, and President Obama signed the Continuing Appropriations Act (P.L. 113-46) on October 17. It funded the government at sequestration levels through January 15, 2014, and suspended the debt ceiling through February 7, 2014.⁸

An estimated 6.6 million federal work days were lost. The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated the shutdown reduced fourth-quarter GDP growth by 0.3 percentage points. Nearly $4 billion in tax refunds were delayed, the Small Business Administration could not process about 700 loan applications worth $140 million, and agencies including the FDA and EPA suspended hundreds of safety inspections.⁷

Sequestration and the Ryan-Murray Budget Deal

The Congress opened under automatic spending cuts created by the 2011 Budget Control Act. The fiscal cliff deal at the end of 2012, the American Taxpayer Relief Act, pushed the sequester back by two months and reduced the first-year cuts by $24 billion, but the cuts took effect on March 1, 2013, slicing $85.3 billion from defense and domestic programs for that fiscal year, split roughly 50-50.¹⁰¹¹

In December 2013, Senate Budget Chair Patty Murray and House Budget Chair Paul Ryan negotiated the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 (P.L. 113-67), signed December 26. The deal provided $63 billion in sequester relief over two years, $45 billion for fiscal 2014 and $18 billion for fiscal 2015, offset by roughly $85 billion in spending cuts and new fees stretched over a decade, including higher airline security fees and larger federal employee retirement contributions. Total discretionary spending was set at about $1.012 trillion for fiscal 2014, and the package was projected to reduce the deficit by about $20 to $23 billion.¹²¹³

Laws That Passed

Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act

One of the first bills signed was the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 (P.L. 113-4), signed March 7, 2013. It gave tribal governments authority to prosecute non-Indian perpetrators of domestic violence on tribal lands, added a nondiscrimination provision covering LGBT individuals in VAWA grant programs, and continued protections letting battered immigrants self-petition for legal status. It passed both chambers with broad bipartisan support.¹⁴¹⁵

Agricultural Act of 2014

After more than two years of negotiation, the Agricultural Act of 2014 (P.L. 113-79) was signed February 7, 2014. The House approved the conference report 251–166 on January 29, and the Senate followed 68–32 on February 4.¹⁶ The bill set agriculture and nutrition policy through fiscal year 2018 at a projected total cost of $956 billion over ten years, with roughly four-fifths of that going to nutrition programs, primarily SNAP. The law cut SNAP spending by more than $8 billion over a decade, largely by changing how energy-assistance benefits factor into SNAP eligibility. The change affected about 3.7 percent of SNAP households, reducing their benefits by an average of roughly $90 per month.¹⁷ On the farm side, direct payments and the counter-cyclical price program were eliminated and replaced with new risk-management tools and expanded crop insurance.

Water Resources Reform and Development Act

The Water Resources Reform and Development Act of 2014 (P.L. 113-121), signed June 10, 2014, authorized Army Corps of Engineers water infrastructure projects. It passed the House 417–3 and the Senate 91–7, one of the most lopsided bipartisan votes of the Congress.¹⁸

The Immigration Bill That Didn’t

The Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S. 744) on June 27, 2013, by a vote of 68–32.¹⁹ The bill offered a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, added border security funding, and overhauled the legal immigration system. Speaker Boehner declined to bring it to the House floor, and it never received a vote there.²⁰

The Nuclear Option

On November 21, 2013, the Senate voted 52–48 to change its rules so that executive-branch nominations and lower-court judicial nominations could be confirmed by a simple majority, instead of the 60 votes previously needed to overcome a filibuster.²¹ Supreme Court nominations were excluded. Majority Leader Reid pushed the change after what Democrats described as unprecedented Republican obstruction; one analysis found that 71 percent of all cloture motions ever filed on presidential nominations in Senate history had targeted President Obama’s nominees.²²

Major Investigations

IRS Targeting

In May 2013, the IRS acknowledged it had used politically loaded search terms, including “tea party,” to flag tax-exempt applications for extra scrutiny. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that IRS employees in Cincinnati had applied “inappropriate criteria” to identify applications for review but did not find evidence of political direction from the White House.²³

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa led the investigation, reviewing more than 1.3 million pages of documents and conducting 52 transcribed interviews with IRS, Treasury, and Justice Department employees. His committee’s final report in December 2014 concluded that conservative organizations had been targeted based on political bias and faulted eight senior IRS officials, including former Commissioner Doug Shulman, former Acting Commissioner Steven Miller, and Lois Lerner, the former director of the Exempt Organizations division.²⁴ In June 2014, the IRS disclosed it had lost emails belonging to Lerner covering a two-year period. On May 7, 2014, the House passed a bipartisan resolution calling on the Attorney General to appoint a special counsel; no special counsel was ever named.²⁵

Benghazi Select Committee

In May 2014, Speaker Boehner established a House Select Committee to consolidate the investigation into the September 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, which had killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina chaired the panel, which combined work already done by the Oversight, Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence committees. Republicans held a majority of its seats, and its work carried well past the 113th Congress.²⁶

CIA Interrogation Report

On December 9, 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Dianne Feinstein, released the declassified executive summary of its study of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. The summary ran more than 500 pages with nearly 2,725 footnotes drawn from CIA records.²⁷ The full classified report exceeded 6,700 pages. The committee concluded that the CIA’s so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence” and that the agency had misled Congress, the White House, and the Justice Department about the program’s results.²⁸ The report documented 119 individuals held in CIA custody and cataloged techniques including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and painful stress positions.²⁹

Productivity in Context

By the end of its first session in December 2013, the 113th had enacted only about 57 laws, the fewest since at least 1947, when tracking began. The “do-nothing Congress” of 1947–1948 had managed 395 bills by the same point in its first year.²⁰ A late burst of activity during the lame-duck session after the 2014 elections pulled the final tally to 296 laws, narrowly surpassing the 283 enacted by the 2011–2012 Congress. The lame-duck session alone produced 111 measures, more than a third of the total, including a $1.1 trillion spending bill and a defense-policy authorization.³

A Congress of Firsts

The 113th set records for demographic representation. A record 103 women served, 83 in the House and 20 in the Senate. A record 37 Hispanic or Latino members took office, and 45 African American members served across both chambers.³⁰ It also included the first Buddhist senator, the first Hindu member of the House, and the first openly bisexual woman elected to the House. For the first time, white men were no longer the majority of the House Democratic caucus.³¹

How It Ended

The November 2014 midterms delivered a decisive Republican wave. The party captured the Senate by flipping seats in West Virginia, Arkansas, South Dakota, Montana, Colorado, and Iowa, among others, giving Republicans at least 52 seats and handing Mitch McConnell the majority leader’s gavel for the 114th Congress. House Republicans expanded their majority to seat counts approaching those last seen in the Truman era. The results gave the GOP unified control of Congress for the first time since 2006.³²

1
U.S. House of Representatives History, Art & Archives. 113th Congress Profile
2
United States Senate. Party Division
3
Pew Research Center. In Late Spurt of Activity, Congress Avoids Least Productive Title
4
United States Senate. Majority and Minority Leaders
5
The New York Times. After Eric Cantor Primary Defeat, House Republicans Take Stock
6
ABC News. Kevin McCarthy Elected to Replace Eric Cantor as House Majority Leader
7
Obama White House Archives. Impacts and Costs of the October 2013 Federal Government Shutdown
8
American Bar Association. Government Shutdown
9
Congressional Research Service. The 2013 Government Shutdown
10
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Sequestration by the Numbers
11
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Understanding the Sequester
12
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Summarizing the Ryan-Murray Deal
13
GovInfo. Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013
14
Obama White House Archives. President Signs 2013 VAWA
15
Every CRS Report. Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization
16
Every CRS Report. The 2014 Farm Bill
17
Choices Magazine. Nutrition Assistance Benefit Cuts in the Agricultural Act of 2014
18
Congress.gov. Water Resources Reform and Development Act
19
United States Senate. Roll Call Vote on S. 744
20
The Christian Science Monitor. The Least Productive Congress Ever
21
American Bar Association. Filibuster Rule Change
22
NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy. The Senate in Transition
23
GovInfo. IRS Targeting Hearing
24
House Oversight Committee. Issa Releases Report as 113th Congress Concludes
25
GovInfo. IRS Special Counsel Hearing
26
Politico. Trey Gowdy Gets Into Benghazi
27
National Security Archive. Senate Torture Report
28
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program
29
Human Rights Watch. US Senate Report Slams CIA Torture, Lies
30
Every CRS Report. Membership of the 113th Congress
31
The Washington Post. 113th Congress Diversity Milestones
32
The Guardian. Republican Wins in Senate Takeover