With House and Senate majorities for the first time in four decades, the Republican leadership of the 104th Congress promised to end "business as usual." Unfortunately, however, there were only two unusual things about this Congress. First, more cash than ever flowed from monied interests into the campaign coffers of members of Congress, as both parties shattered their fundraising records. Second, this Congress went to extreme lengths to try to reward corporate campaign contributors.

More than any Congress in recent memory, the 104th Congress seemed determined to loosen the civic bonds of accountability that can restrain big corporations from taking advantage of individual consumers and workers. The 104th Congress attempted to enact a series of laws designed to roll back a wide range of protections for the environment, public health and safety, individual and states’ rights and national sovereignty.

Public Citizen’s Congress Watch prepared this scorecard to help voters evaluate whether their elected officials represented the broad concerns of citizens or the narrow agenda of monied interests. Each of the major issues indexed profoundly affects the daily lives of ordinary people.

Public Health, Safety and the Environment: A large business coalition including energy, utility, transportation, drug and auto companies, pushed Congress to within a hair’s breadth of passing a sweeping bill to roll back the federal government’s ability to set standards to implement the nation’s health, safety and environmental laws. The bill threatened to halt 30 years of progress making highways safer, workplaces less hazardous, food purer, and our air and water cleaner. At the same time, Congress continued to shower the polluting oil, coal and nuclear industries with hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks, while public interest advocates scrambled to preserve minimal funding for cleaner renewable technologies and energy efficiency programs.

Civil Justice: Prodded by a huge coalition of business interests including auto, tobacco, chemical, drug and insurance companies, Congress mounted a furious attack on the civil jury system. The courtroom is a key arena in which ordinary Americans can hold powerful institutions accountable for their actions. Only President Clinton’s veto prevented establishment of a law that would have limited the ability of citizens injured or killed by dangerous or defective products to get full compensation for their injuries, and crippled the power of citizen jurors to punish the wrongdoers who knowingly or recklessly manufacture such products.

Trade and Economic Globalization: The House voted to extend special trade privileges to China despite its abysmal human rights record and a massive trade imbalance with the U.S. It also passed a bill implementing a ruling under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that would eviscerate a longstanding U.S. law prohibiting the sale of tuna caught using methods that kill dolphins in the process. These votes appear to confirm the fears of opponents of GATT and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) who believe that modern trade agreements and corporate globalization are fostering a deadly economic "race to the bottom" in which nations are forced to compete to lower environmental, health and worker safety standards—and wages—in order persuade corporations not to move jobs.

Corporate Welfare: Despite its rhetoric about balancing the budget, the 104th Congress largely ignored the more than $100 billion in corporate tax and spending subsidies that lard the federal budget, preferring to attempt deep cuts in programs for the most vulnerable Americans—children, the elderly, and the poor.

Health Care: The 104th Congress abandoned any pretense of trying to guarantee Americans access to health care, instead passing deep cuts in Medicare and Medicaid that threatened the integrity of both programs. Those cuts were vetoed by President Clinton, but the nation’s health care crisis still awaits serious congressional attention.

Political Reform: To its credit, the 104th Congress passed several measures to curb the power of lobbyists and make their activities known to the public, including congressional gift bans and a new Lobbying Disclosure Act, which expanded the amount of information lobbyists must make available to the public. However, the one measure most needed to begin restoring public faith in our democracy foundered badly; Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and the House leadership did not allow meaningful campaign finance reform to reach the floor of the House, and supporters of a bipartisan measure failed to gather the 60 votes necessary to put it to a vote in the Senate.