It is not surprising that 90 percent of incumbents are reelected. The situation is not static, however. Legislators run for other offices, and vacancies are created by death, retirement, and resignation. Although term limits, restricting the number of consecutive terms an individual can serve, were rejected by the Supreme Court, the idea continues to enjoy the support of voters who want to see more open contests. The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the only presiding officer and traditionally has been the main spokesperson for the majority party in the House.
The position is a very powerful one; the Speaker is third in line in presidential succession after the president and vice president. The Speaker's real power comes from controlling the selection of committee chairs and committee members and the authority to set the order of business of the House. The majority floor leader is second only to the Speaker.
He or she comes from the political party that controls the House and is elected through a caucus, a meeting of the House party members. The majority leader presents the official position of the party on issues and tries to keep party members loyal to that position, which is not always an easy task. In the event that a minority party wins a majority of the seats in a congressional election, its minority leader usually becomes the majority leader.
The minority party in the House also has a leadership structure, topped by the minority floor leader. Whoever fills this elected position serves as the chief spokesperson and legislative strategist for the party and often works hard to win the support of moderate members of the opposition on particular votes.
Although the minority leader has little formal power, it is an important job, especially because whoever holds it conventionally takes over the speakership if control of the House changes hands. The Senate has a somewhat different leadership structure. The vice president is officially the presiding officer and is called the president of the Senate. The vice president seldom appears in the Senate chamber in this role unless it appears that a crucial vote may end in a tie.
In such instances, the vice president casts the tiebreaking vote. To deal with day-to-day business, the Senate chooses the president pro tempore.
This position is an honorary one and is traditionally given to the senator in the majority party who has the longest continuous service. Because the president pro tempore is a largely ceremonial office, the real work of presiding is done by many senators. As in the House, the Senate has majority and minority leaders.
The majority leader exercises considerable political influence. One of the most successful majority leaders was Lyndon Johnson, who led the Senate from to His power of persuasion was legendary in getting fellow senators to go along with him on key votes. In both the Senate and the House, the majority and minority party leadership selects whips, who see to it that party members are present for important votes.
They also provide their colleagues with information needed to ensure party loyalty. Because there are so many members of Congress, whips are aided by numerous assistants.
Much of the work of Congress is done in committees, where bills are introduced, hearings are held, and the first votes on proposed laws are taken. The committee structure allows Congress to research an area of public policy, to hear from interested parties, and to develop the expertise of its members.
Committee membership reflects the party breakdown; the majority party has a majority of the seats on each committee, including the chair, who is usually chosen by seniority years of consecutive service on the committee. Membership on a key committee may also be politically advantageous to a senator or representative. Both houses have four types of committees: standing, select, conference, and joint.
Although its prescribed purpose was to revise the Articles of Confederation , a number of delegates charted a path toward replacing the Articles entirely. The national legislature had been made up of a single chamber composed of an equal number of delegates from each of the states. Virginia and other large states felt it would be unfair to continue with this equal distribution of power.
In this proposed two-chamber Congress, states with larger populations would have more representatives in each chamber. Predictably, smaller states like New Jersey disagreed.
They issued their own plan calling for a single-chamber Congress with equal representation by state and more state authority. A third proposal eventually calmed this storm of debate over allocation of power between large and small states. The Connecticut Compromise, also called the Great Compromise , proposed a bicameral congress with members apportioned differently in each house. The upper house, the Senate, would have two representatives from each state.
In the lower house, the House of Representatives, representation would be proportional to the population in each state. In the final draft of the U. Constitution , the bicameral Congress received a number of powers and limitations. These are outlined in Article I Appendix B. The bicameral structure requires the two chambers to pass identical bill s , or proposed legislation. After all amending and modifying has occurred, the two houses ultimately must agree on the legislation they send to the president for approval.
Passing the same bill in both houses is intentionally difficult. The framers designed a complex and difficult process for legislation to become law. This challenge serves several important and related functions.
First, the difficulty of passing legislation through both houses makes it less likely, though hardly impossible, that Congress will act on emotion or without the necessary deliberation. Second, the bicameral system ensures that large-scale dramatic reform is exceptionally difficult to pass and that the status quo is more likely to hold. Third, the bicameral system makes it difficult for a single faction or interest group to enact laws and restrictions unfairly favoring it. The website of the U.
Congress Visitor Center contains a number of interesting online exhibits and informational facts about the U. Demographically speaking, Congress as a whole is still imbalanced and remains largely white, male, and wealthy.
For example, more than half the U. Congress is also overwhelmingly Christian. The diversity of the country is not reflected in the U. Congress, whose current membership is approximately 80 percent male, 82 percent white, and 92 percent Christian. As a term and a practice, pork-barrel politics—federal spending on projects designed to benefit a particular district or set of constituents—has been around since the nineteenth century, when barrels of salt pork were both a sign of wealth and a system of reward.
While pork-barrel politics are often deplored during election campaigns, and earmarks—funds appropriated for specific projects—are no longer permitted in Congress see feature box below , legislative control of local appropriations nevertheless still exists. In ranching, an earmark is a small cut on the ear of a cow or other animal to denote ownership. Since the s, the earmark has become a common vehicle for sending money to various projects around the country.
Many a road, hospital, and airport can trace its origins back to a few skillfully drafted earmarks. Relatively few people outside Congress had ever heard of the term before the presidential election, when Republican nominee Senator John McCain touted his career-long refusal to use earmarks as a testament to his commitment to reform spending habits in Washington.
As the country sank into recession and Congress tried to use spending bills to stimulate the economy, the public grew more acutely aware of earmarking. Congresspersons became eager to distance themselves from the practice. In fact, the use of earmarks to encourage Republicans to help pass health care reform actually made the bill less popular with the public. When Republicans took over control of the House in , they outlawed earmarks.
But with deadlocks and stalemates becoming more common, some quiet voices have begun asking for their return. They argue that Congress works because representatives can satisfy their responsibilities to their constituents by making deals.
The earmarks are those deals. The Constitution specifies that every state will have two senators who each serve a six-year term. Therefore, with fifty states in the Union, there are currently one hundred seats in the U. Senators were originally appointed by state legislatures, but in the Seventeenth Amendment allowed senators to be elected by popular vote in each state.
Seats in the House of Representatives are distributed among the states based on population and each member is elected by voters in a specific congressional district. Each state is guaranteed at least one seat in the House. Redistricting redrawing boundaries occurs every ten years, after the U.
Census has established how many persons live in the United States and where. The boundaries of legislative districts are redrawn as needed to balance the number of voters in each while still maintaining a total of districts. Because local areas can see population growth or decline over time, these boundary adjustments are typically needed every ten years.
Based on the census there are seven states with only one representative Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming , whereas the most populous state, California, has fifty-three congressional districts. Congressional apportionment today is achieved through the equal proportions method , which uses a mathematical formula to allocate seats based on U. Census Bureau population data counting citizens in each state gathered every ten years as required by the Constitution.
At the close of the first U. Congress in , there were sixty-five representatives, each representing approximately thirty thousand citizens. As the territory of the United States expanded the population requirement for each new district increased as well. Adjustments reapportionment occured, but the House of Representatives roster continued to grow until it reached members after the census. Ten years later with the census and urbanization changing populations across the country, Congress failed to reapportion membership.
An agreement was reached in to permanently cap the number of seats in the House at Although the total number of seats in the House of Representatives has been capped at , the apportionment of seats by state may change each decade following the official census. In this map, we see the changes in seat reapportionment that followed the Census. George Washington advocated for 30, people per elected member to retain effective representation in the House.
However, today the average number of citizens in a congressional district now tops , This is arguably too many for House members to remain in touch with the people. This tends to place much power in the hands of only a small number of legislators. The Founding Fathers of the United States favored a bicameral legislature.
The idea was to have the Senate be wealthier and wiser. The Senate was created to be a stabilizing force, elected not by mass electors, but selected by the State legislators.
State legislators chose the Senate and senators had to possess a significant amount of property in order to be deemed worthy and sensible enough for the position. One of the arguments used to sell the idea at the time to Nebraska voters was that by adopting a unicameral system, the perceived evils of the conference committee process would be eliminated.
During his term as Governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura proposed converting the Minnesotan legislature to a single chamber with proportional representation, as a reform that he felt would solve many legislative difficulties and impinge upon legislative corruption. Ventura argued that bicameral legislatures for provincial and local areas were excessive and unnecessary, and discussed unicameralism as a reform that could address many legislative and budgetary problems for states.
An agenda is a list of meeting activities in the order in which they are to be taken up in the legislature. An agenda is a list of meeting activities in the order in which they are to be taken up, by beginning with the call to order and ending with adjournment.
It usually includes one or more specific items of business to be discussed. It may, but is not required to, include specific times for one or more activities. A political agenda is a set of issues and policies laid out by an executive or cabinet in government that tries to influence current and near-future political news and debate.
In parliamentary procedure, an agenda is not binding upon an assembly unless its own rules make it so or unless it has been adopted as the agenda for the meeting by majority vote at the start of the meeting. Otherwise, it is merely for the guidance of the chair. If an agenda is binding upon an assembly, and a specific time is listed for an item. That item cannot be taken up before that time and must be taken up when that time arrives even if other business is pending. If it is desired to do otherwise, the rules can be suspended for that purpose.
The political agenda while shaped by government can be influenced by grassroots support from party activists at events, such as a party conference, and can even be shaped by non-governmental activist groups which have a political aim. Increasingly, the mass media can have an effect in shaping the political agenda through its news coverage of news stories.
A political party can be described as shaping the political agenda or setting the political agenda if its promotion of certain issues gains prominent news coverage. For example, at election time, if a political party wants to promote its polices and gain prominent news coverage in order to increase its support. A congressional committee is a legislative sub-organization in Congress that handles a specific duty. A congressional committee is a legislative sub-organization in the U. Congress that handles a specific duty.
Committee membership enables members to develop specialized knowledge of the matters under their jurisdiction. Committees monitor on-going governmental operations, identify issues suitable for legislative review, gather and evaluate information and recommend courses of action to their parent body.
It is neither expected nor possible that a member of Congress be an expert on all matters and subject areas that come before Congress. Congressional committees provide invaluable informational services to Congress by investigating and reporting about specialized subjects. Most legislation is considered by standing committees which have jurisdiction over a particular subject such as Agriculture or Appropriations. The House has twenty standing committees; the Senate has sixteen.
Standing committees meet at least once each month. Almost all standing committee meetings for transacting business must be open to the public unless the committee votes, publicly, to close the meeting. A committee might call for public hearings on important bills. Each committee is led by a chair who belongs to the majority party and a ranking member of the minority party. Witnesses and experts can present their case for or against a bill. Committees may also amend the bill, but the full house holds the power to accept or reject committee amendments.
After debate, the committee votes whether it wishes to report the measure to the full house. If a bill is tabled then it is rejected. If amendments are extensive, sometimes a new bill with amendments built in will be submitted as a so-called clean bill with a new number.
Congress divides its legislative, oversight, and internal administrative tasks among approximately committees and subcommittees. Within assigned areas, these functional subunits gather information, compare and evaluate legislative alternatives, identify policy problems and propose solutions, select, determine, and report measures for full chamber consideration, monitor executive branch performance and investigate allegations of wrongdoing. While this investigatory function is important, procedures such as the House discharge petition process are so difficult to implement that committee jurisdiction over particular subject matter of bills has expanded into semi-autonomous power.
Since , the growing autonomy of committees has fragmented the power of each congressional chamber as a unit. Over time, this system proved ineffective, so in the Senate adopted a formal system of 11 standing committees with five members each. With the advent of this new system, committees are able to handle long-term studies and investigations, in addition to regular legislative duties.
With the growing responsibilities of the Senate, the committees gradually grew to be the key policy-making bodies of the Senate, instead of merely technical aids to the chamber. By , the Senate maintained 66 standing and select committees—eight more committees than members of the majority party. The large number of committees and the manner of assigning their chairmanships suggests that many of them existed solely to provide office space in those days before the Senate acquired its first permanent office building, the Russell Senate Office Building.
By May 27, , the Russell Senate Office Building had opened, and with all Senate members assigned private office space, the Senate quietly abolished 42 committees.
Today the Senate operates with 20 standing and select committees. These select committees, however, are permanent in nature and are treated as standing committees under Senate rules. The first House Committee was appointed on April 2, to prepare and report such standing rules and orders of proceeding as well as the duties of a Sergeant-at-Arms to enforce those rules.
Other committees were created as needed, on a temporary basis, to review specific issues for the full House. The House relied primarily on the Committee of the Whole to handle the bulk of legislative issues. The Committee on Ways and Means followed on July 24, during a debate on the creation of the Treasury Department over concerns of giving the new department too much authority over revenue proposals.
The House felt it would be better equipped if it established a committee to handle the matter. This first Committee on Ways and Means had 11 members and existed for just two months.
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