“I don’t know if they ever intend to do anything,” lamented an exasperated Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House minority leader, at her weekly press conference. “Again, the legislative branch, the first article of the Constitution, the first branch of government, the legislative branch, and we are not legislating. We are not legislating.”

A day earlier, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) offered a similar complaint.

“I mean, this House of Representatives might just as well not exist,” Reid said in an interview with the website Fusion. “They don’t do anything.”

Asked on Thursday what the GOP majority had to show for 2013, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) offered a lengthy answer but did not mention any items that had actually made it to Obama’s desk.

“There’s a lot that can be done,” he said. “Listen, we have a very divided country, and we have a very divided government, and I’m not going to sit here and underestimate the difficulty in finding the common ground. Because there’s not as much common ground here as there used to be. But our job is to find that common ground, and I intend to do it.”