Photo by pablo.raw

At noon, the 113th Congress will be sworn in. And with that biennial occasion, we can all breath a collective sigh of relief that the 112th Congress—one of the most dunderheaded, lazy and fatuous legislatures in our nation’s history—will be no more.

In its two years mucking everything up with intractable fiscal debates and insouciant refusals to tend to matters like, say, hurricane relief, the 112th Congress, under the timorous leadership of House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), made a strong case for being the worst Congress in our nation’s history. It did not seriously consider legislation about climate change or gun control; it allowed the Violence Against Women Act to lapse; and, oh, yeah, it nearly shut down the federa government—and with it, the District government—several times.

Here are three instances that should explain why we won’t be missing the 112th Congress:

1. April 2011: Just a few months into this era of divided government, Congress and the White House came within hours—mere hours!—of causing the first government shutdown since 1994 when they were unable to agree to an omnibus spending agreement that would keep services going. And as D.C.’s budget is a function of the federal purse, had the federal government gone off the rails, so, too, would have the city’s. But potentially forcing D.C. to cut off services like sanitation and street maintenance was just one of the nasty effects. A key sticking point in this round of budget negotiations was the House majority’s desire to reinstate a ban on D.C. using its own revenue to pay for abortions for low-income women. When a short-term spending bill was finally agreed upon, amid the settling dust was this line that President Obama said to Boehner during their negotiations: “John, I will give you D.C. abortion.”

2. December 2011: By the way, did we mention that April 2011 deal was a short-term thing? Because by December of that year, Congress was back at it, threatening to push the government into non-operation over yet another omnibus spending fight. And while another spending plan was reached with the clock running low, D.C. was still forced to start preparing for a temporary recision in valuable civic services.

3. March 2012: When House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who later became Mitt Romney’s running mate, proposed a budget that would further pare down domestic spending, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) once again warned District leaders to prepare for fiscal chaos. Ryan’s proposed fiscal 2013 budget, she said at the time, “could lead to a federal government, and therefore a District of Columbia government, shutdown on October 1.” It didn’t, and Ryan’s budget has been all but scuttled save its occasional use as a Republican Party shibboleth, but the schizophrenic pace of 2011 gave Norton and the rest of us plenty of cause to fear a government shutdown.

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So, there you have it: Three ugly moments out of a very ugly Congress. But, wait! There was one final insult just in the past few days. With the United States apparently headed over a “fiscal cliff” with the scheduled expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and the federal debt hitting its limit, Congress was once again tasked with rescuing the country from its own stupid clutches. After several failed starts—Boehner’s “Plan B,” and so forth—Congress and the White House finally settled on an extension of income tax rates on people making $450,000 and below, resulting in additional revenue of $600 billion over the next 10 years, or roughly one-third of what Obama said he initially wanted.

But, of course, the debt limit was not addressed in the final deal, meaning that in two months’ time, when the Treasury Department’s ability to keep the United States from defaulting on its loans runs out, we get to do all this shutdown bullshit again.