John Thune: “as we wrap up--or are about to wrap up, I should say--our legislative work for 2025, I would say it has been quite a…”

“as we wrap up--or are about to wrap up, I should say--our legislative work for 2025, I would say it has been quite a busy year here in the U.S. Senate: the longest session period in 15 years to kick off the year; a historic number of votes--the most, literally, in half a century. In fact, you can see on this chart the number of votes. You go back, the first date on there is 1989. Obviously, this is pretty small and difficult to see, perhaps, unless you are standing right over it, but if you look at the red line here, that is this year. So 653 votes have been cast so far this year, which dwarfs any year going back to 1989, which is what we have data going back to. We have since researched further back. Turns out there was one year-- 1976. We went back eight decades. There was one year, in 1976, where the Senate cast more votes than we did this year. But if you go back to 1989, the closest one is right here--1995, which, for those of us who were actually following it back then, that was the Contract with America year, and so that was a record number of votes cast in both I think the House and the Senate. But we have eclipsed that with 613 votes cast in 1995. This year, in the U.S. Senate, we have already cast 653, and we are not quite done yet. It is historic just in terms of the number of votes cast, the number of hours in session, and the number of days in session; also historic just in terms of the amount of time that we have been around here.”