WASHINGTON — This Congress started with showy bluster, a bitter 15-round, multi-day spectacle to elect a House speaker, a Republican who vowed to “never quit,” and then did just that.

House lawmakers proceeded not only to oust the GOP speaker, they also punished their own colleagues with censures and expulsion, launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and were barely able to conduct the basics of governing by keeping federal offices from shuttering.

While this first year of the 118th Congress was a historic one, thanks to the dizzying turmoil coming from the Republicans on the House side of the Capitol, next year is headed toward more of the same. With just 27 bills and resolutions signed into law, not counting a few board appointments, it’s among the most do-nothing sessions of Congress in recent times.

“This fall has been a very actively stupid political environment,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry, the bow-tie-wearing Republican from North Carolina, who emerged as a voice of reason as the interim House speaker leading the chamber during the upheaval.

While Americans typically give low marks to Congress, as the branch of government closest to the people, it’s still the main venue the U.S. relies on, at times more so than the presidency or the courts, to work out the nation’s problems and challenges.

The need for a functioning Congress — what one scholar calls “the place” where it all happens — is even more apparent heading into a tumultuous presidential election year and with hot wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East.

“People’s expectations for this Congress were so low, and so just doing the bare minimum seems like a passing grade,” said Philip Wallach, author of “Why Congress” and a senior scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington.

He said he’s grading this Congress on a curve. “I see this as symptoms rather than causes — symptoms of a lot of sort of institutional and cultural breakdowns or decay that have led to a lot of really bad feelings and a lot of desire to lash out across the aisle,” he said.

Next year has its own challenges ahead with Biden facing a potential rematch against Donald Trump, the former president and Republican party front-runner. Trump’s loss in 2020 resulted in his supporters laying siege to the U.S. Capitol, and a charge of insurrection led to his second impeachment, for which he was acquitted by the Senate. It now threatens his removal from the Colorado ballot.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said “the dark cloud of Donald Trump looms” as the GOP tries to find its way.

“We’re going to persevere,” Schumer said in an interview with The Associated Press, listing bills to lower the price of insulin, ensure child safety online and others he is lining up for the new year.

While the House Republicans, in majority control, led the chaos, including the removal of indicted GOP Rep. George Santos of New York, the Senate, despite its proclivity toward moderation, was not immune to the dysfunction.

One single Republican, Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, threw the Defense Department into crisis by blocking the promotions of hundreds of military officers, including some of the nation’s most essential four-star generals. He finally relented just before the holiday recess.

And as Ukraine fights for its political survival against the Russian invasion, senators tried, and failed, to broker a U.S.-Mexico border security deal demanded by Republicans in exchange for providing more American military aid to the Western ally — despite a personal visit from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pleading to help.