Well, it turns about Congress is more productive when there’s pork to be gobbled:

Water projects flow despite tea party

Pressure from conservatives helped push the GOP to shut down the government, strip food stamps out of the farm bill and bring the country to the brink of default.

But when many of the same groups united against an $8.2 billion water infrastructure bill, tea-party Republicans in the House weren’t listening.

Instead, GOP members joined with Democrats late Wednesday in a 417-3 vote to green-light a suite of dam, port-dredging, flood protection and environmental restoration projects, withstanding pressure from conservative groups that said the bill does too little to reform the lumbering, big-spending Army Corps of Engineers.

The near-unanimous roll call was enough to give some members “whiplash,” lawmakers said, while offering a contrast to the schism that divided moderate and conservative Republicans during the shutdown. It also showed that groups like Heritage Action, FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity have limits to their sway with the current crop of House conservatives — not enough to keep lawmakers from steering money to popular projects back home.

Beyond that, these kinds of big water project bills are bipartisan affairs that have historically won by huge margins. And the House’s version, while formally disavowing earmarks, offered plenty of benefits to Republican lawmakers, steering most of the projects and potential money to GOP-held House districts, according to a POLITICO analysis.

Meanwhile, Congress — and more specifically the House GOP — has been taking a thrashing in the polls after the 16-day shutdown this month. The water bill offered a chance to show Americans that lawmakers were getting back to work.

Notably, Heritage Action did not declare this a ‘key vote’, meaning they won’t use this vote rank members of Congress. But that was more a case of HA not giving an order it knew would not be obeyed.