On September 2, 2011, the government’s official unemployment statistics revealed that the U.S. economy had created zero jobs in August, and the unemployment rate stood at 9.1 percent.

A few days later, on Sept. 8, President Barack Obama addressed a special joint session of Congress to announce his “jobs bill”--the American Jobs Act. Obama warned that “doing nothing is not an option,” and called upon Americans to join him in pressuring Congress.

But Congress “did nothing”--or, rather, the Senate did nothing. House Republicans did pass parts of Obama’s jobs bill, but rejected the majority of its provisions, which largely reprised the failed stimulus of 2009. The Democrat-controlled Senate delayed bringing Obama’s jobs bill to a vote, while the president campaigned against Congress, warning that without passing the jobs bill, “There will be fewer jobs; there will be weaker growth.”

Four months later, as President Obama prepares to return to Capitol Hill for his State of the Union address, the “do-nothing Congress” has still failed to pass the American Jobs Act.

And yet the economy, while still weak, created 200,000 jobs in December. Unemployment has fallen to 8.5 percent; manufacturing is improving moderately; consumer confidence, while still unsteady, has risen; and economists talk about revising growth projections for 2012 upward.

Given those results, perhaps Congress should “do nothing” more often.

Actually, the Republican-controlled House has passed nearly 30 bills aimed at accelerating growth and job creation. All of those have languished in the Senate, which has failed even to pass a budget in nearly 1,000 days. The Democrats’ leaders in the Senate leadership have calculated that gridlock works to its political advantage, and have succeeded in casting their House counterparts as obstructionist.

Indeed, Democrats call Republicans--and the Tea Party in particular--“extremists” for cutting the growth of federal spending. They compare conservatives to “terrorists” for refusing to pass a debt ceiling increase without spending cuts. And they cast Republicans as “hostage-takers” for insisting that the payroll tax holiday extension apply to a full year and be paid for through spending cuts, not through new taxes or fees on homeowners.

But these GOP policies are all reasonable positions--compromises, in fact, from the viewpoint of the voters that elected the Tea Party class of 2010. And for daring to honor some of their promises, these representatives--who mustered the political courage to vote for Medicare reform in last year’s House budget--are being pilloried by the Democrats, the Obama administration and the media for allegedly putting their party ahead of their country.

With control of only one house of Congress, this Republican class is praiseworthy as much for what it has prevented as for what it has achieved.

It blocked Democrats from bailing out profligate state governments; it prevented the Obama administration from expanding spending on “green jobs” and other self-dealing boondoggles; and it stopped Democrats from raising income tax rates on job creators in the midst of a weak economic recovery.

In other words, the “do-nothing Congress” created a modicum of fiscal and economic stability that has enabled the American economy to regain some of its confidence and strength.

In fact, the recovery that we may be witnessing today might have begun in 2009, had Obama and the Democrats’ “do-everything Congress” not vastly expanded federal intervention in the economy through the stimulus and new laws like ObamaCare.

The 112th Congress has passed fewer bills than any since 1947--and though Republicans lost power in both houses in 1948, economic growth soared that year.

Facing dim prospects in 2012, President Obama is borrowing from Harry Truman’s 1948 playbook and running a similar campaign against a “do-nothing Congress”--with the enthusiastic support of Democrats who forget they are also members of that Congress.

“I think it’s really important for the president to make the race he is running against the do-nothing Congress,” urged Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Jan. 8, with scarcely a hint of irony. Likewise, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has celebrated the prospect of a government shutdown whenever it has arisen, reminding Republicans that they came out as political losers during the confrontations of Clinton years.

But Schumer forgets the larger lesson of that shutdown, which is that the economy did just fine without the federal government being involved--the stock market rising, the economy growing, the job market humming.

Unlike “the buck stops here” Truman, Obama has done even less than the Congress he attacks--most notably in his neglect of the nation’s debt. He rejected the findings of his Simpson-Bowles commission, enabling the country’s debt rating downgrade last summer. He also refused to assist the Congress’s debt super-committee, whose failure to produce a deal on debt reduction led to defense sequestrations that Obama has already eagerly embraced.

The fawning mainstream media has come to the absentee president’s aid by heaping scorn upon the “do-nothing” Congress, attacking the Tea Party in particular for allegedly hijacking the Republican party and Washington in general.

Would that it were so!

Doing “nothing” may be the best the ambitious Tea Party can manage for now. But if the economic recovery holds out, America will owe the “do-nothing” Congress a debt of gratitude.