Rep. Tom Tancredo (R., Colo.) admits that he has missed several congressional votes during his long-shot campaign for the presidency. But some votes he only wishes he’d missed. Last Monday, he swiped his card to vote on a resolution “supporting the goals of National Bullying Prevention Awareness Week.”

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“I was just about to push the green button and vote yes,” he tells National Review Online. “And then I thought to myself: ‘This is so stupid!’ Of course I’m against bullying, but for Congress to spend even one minute on this — it’s just demeaning.” Tancredo was the sole member to vote “present” on the measure, as 375 of his colleagues voted in favor and none against.

Congress takes scores of meaningless and non-controversial votes every year. But in the past they were arranged so as not to waste members’ valuable time on what are commonly known as “bed-check” roll calls. So far this year 68 meaningless or non-controversial votes have been stretched out over 23 Monday evenings — apparently for no other reason than to fulfill Democrats’ promise for a congressional “five-day work week.” Democrats are now giving up on that campaign promise, as their first year in the majority has proven that five days in Washington does not translate to more work getting done.

“The reason we didn’t work five-day weeks was that there was no work to do,” says former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R., Tex.). “They’re cramming a three-day work week into five days.”

During the last Congress and in previous years, Monday votes were avoided in the House so that congressmen could spend more time meeting constituents (part of their job, after all) or being with their families. Members could then take a Monday evening or Tuesday morning flight to Washington for three days of votes and committee meetings. Staff worked weekdays and sometimes weekends on Capitol Hill just to provide members with enough legislative work to do on those three days. Members could usually schedule flights back to their districts for late Thursday night or Friday without fear that they would suddenly be called back.

“That was the brilliance of the design,” says DeLay, who claimed that many Democrats were perfectly happy with the old schedule. “You want members to stay in front of their constituents all the time. You want to give them every opportunity to be with their families, too — it was tough enough with the schedule we kept back then, especially for members west of the Mississippi River.”

But some Democrats saw the schedule as a potential political issue for the 2006 campaign. They heaped criticism for it on the Republicans, who were also pilloried by Stephen Colbert and Keith Olbermann.