<\/a>Have you noticed how mainstream media fills up a whole lot of airtime sounding off about our current do-nothing Congress? Just this morning, while driving in my car, I listened to yet another report on public radio about how the 113th Congress is on track to be the least productive in history.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no disputing the pathetic public record of this current Congress. But have legislators actually been doing nothing? It looks to me like the media once again is taking the easy way out. If reporters and commentators would bother to look closer, maybe they\u2019d see that congressional Republicans have been doing a whole lot of something.<\/p>\n And that something has cost taxpayers a bundle of change.<\/p>\n So let\u2019s ask the obvious question: What have House Republicans been doing down there on the Potomac anyway? Well, for one thing they fought long and hard in court to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. You know, that was the act that was struck down by the Roberts court in a 5-4 decision. By the time they\u2019d lost that battle, House Republicans managed to drain a tidy $2.3 million<\/a> from the public coffers.<\/p>\n And how about the bogus blame game surrounding the tragic events at the American embassy in Benghazi? Republicans just can\u2019t stop wasting time and treasure on whipping up trumped-up charges. Establishing the Select Committee on Benghazi to keep the finger pointing in the news already has cost $3.3 million. This year alone the House Benghazi panel is on track to send another $3 million down the hole. And the IRS has reported that it has\u00a0 spent more than $14 million <\/a>in taxpayer money accommodating Republican requests, turning over more than 600,000 pages of documents.<\/p>\n Remember the debt-ceiling battle and the fiscal-cliff debacle? Please don\u2019t tell me Americans have forgotten that bit of theatre. The Republican lie was that voting against raising the debt ceiling was the fiscally responsible thing to do and would strengthen the economy. Way to go, House Republicans. How did that work out for us? That nifty tactic, along with just the threat of a government shutdown, resulted in the first downgrade of America\u2019s credit rating in history. And the price tag to taxpayers? Just a drop in the bucket, folks, at $1.3 billion.<\/a> (And what, you may ask, does that chunk of change buy these days, anyway? How about some badly needed infrastructure repairs that would create a ton of jobs in the construction industry.)<\/p>\n