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You can argue about whether Congress ever gets anything done, but everyone can agree that even when they're not doing anything, they are talking about about getting things done.
And in 2008, no one in the New Jersey delegation even came close to matching Sen. Bob Menendez in the number of words spoken on the floor of Congress or added afterward to the official Congressional Record.
That's according to the web site capitolwords.org, a project of the Sunlight Foundation that scours the Congressional Record and counts how many words each member said and which ones appear most often. The site does not include procedural words or those with little significance to indexing, such as "about" or "program."
In their own way, these scorecards tell a lot of about the work Congress is doing, and who is doing it.
Menendez led the New Jersey pack over the past year with 4,525 words in his tally, more than double the 1,775 from fellow Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg.
Rep. Rush Holt, D-Hopewell Township, was the most loquacious House member with 2,630 words, followed by Rep. Scott Garrett, R-Wantage, at 2,109.
It's important to note that House members usually are limited to a few minutes speaking time during debates that are tightly controlled by rules. Senators, by contrast, can often show up in an empty chamber and speak to the C-Span cameras for a half hour or more.
