Last week, during Congress’ lame duck session to consider economic stimulus legislation, a couple dozen more bills were introduced, bringing the total number of bills in the current Congress above 11,000. And it’s not over: Congress will probably come back the week of December 8th to do a little more legislating.

Statistics don’t often mean a lot – particularly simple ones like “number of bills introduced.” But when you see thousands and thousands of bills go in the hopper and nothing being done to run the legislative trains on time, something is going wrong.

I pointed this out in a post from August called “10,000 Bills Introduced in Congress, While Government Management Goes Neglected.” Congress was writing all this legislation, but didn’t pass any regular annual spending bills. The number of bills has increased by 10% since then.

One is struck with curiosity, of course, why some bills are introduced with just days to go in the legislative session. They’re not going anywhere. When Congress finally adjourns sine die (latin for “for real”), all these bills will be dead. The process starts over again next year.

And that’s actually part of the story, starting over again. Lobbyists and congressional staff like to point out that a bill has a history – “It’s been introduced in the last three Congresses” – to show that a bill is something serious. So they might still work to get a bill introduced even if it has no chance of passing.

But more than that, I think it’s a signal that Congress is doing too many things at once. And, as noted in that 10,000 bills post, it’s definitely not doing the regular work of running the government. It’s enough to make you want to . . . take the rest of the week off and eat some turkey!