Lo and behold, Congress actually got some big things done this year.

By just about any standard, the House and Senate passed more significant pieces of legislation in 2015 than at any point since President Obama’s first two years in office, when Democratic majorities gave him a raft of landmark policy achievements. The laws Congress enacted this year were not as expansive, but with Republicans controlling Capitol Hill for the first time since 2006, they were all bipartisan.

The list of major congressional actions includes:

Using the last four years as a point of comparison is admittedly setting a low bar for judging the first session of the 114th Congress. As anyone paying even occasional attention to Washington politics could tell you, not much made it out of the Capitol between 2011 and 2014. The Republican-controlled House bickered with a Senate run by Democrats, and lawmakers lurched from one crisis to the next. Most of the noteworthy legislation that did pass—a deficit-reduction bill in 2011, the fiscal-cliff deal in 2013—were significant merely because they forestalled a calamity of Congress’s own making, not because they established new law or proactively addressed a national problem.