House members historically defer to the decisions of committees, while senators tend to view committee decisions as recommendations, often seeking additional discussion that could lead to changes. Therefore, with fifty states in the Union, there are currently one hundred seats in the U.S. Senate. There are twenty standing committees in the House and sixteen in the Senate. Because of the traditions of unlimited debate and the filibuster, the majority and minority leaders often occupy the floor together in an attempt to keep things moving along. An agreement was reached in 1929 to permanently cap the number of seats in the House at 435. These include the power to levy and collect taxes, declare war, raise an army and navy, coin money, borrow money, regulate commerce among the states and with foreign nations, establish federal courts and bankruptcy rules, establish rules for immigration and naturalization, and issue patents and copyrights. These types of committees often conduct special investigations. After only a handful of years, the states of the union decided that the Articles were unworkable and that the national government needed to be strengthened. By taking them away Congress has hampered its own ability to “bring home the bacon.”. As the country grew larger and more complex the assumption that government needed to assert regulatory power grew. Explain gerrymandering and the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. Congresspersons became eager to distance themselves from the practice. His popularity and resultant ability to be elected four times allowed him to greatly overshadow Congress. The framers designed a complex and difficult process for legislation to become law. Moreover, under the proposed bicameral, two-chambered system, each chamber would act as a check on the other.

(Credit: modification of work by the Library of Congress). There are sixteen standing committees in the Senate, and each position must be filled. Senators were originally appointed by state legislatures, but in 1913 the Seventeenth Amendment allowed senators to be elected by popular vote in each state. Such powers include the power to control borders of the state, the power to expand the territory of the state, and the power to defend itself from internal revolution or coups. At the close of the first U.S. Congress in 1791, there were sixty-five representatives, each representing approximately thirty thousand citizens. Permanent committee of congress that focuses on a particular topic is known as a standing committee. Congressional apportionment today is achieved through the equal proportions method, which uses a mathematical formula to allocate seats based on U.S. Census Bureau population data (counting citizens in each state) gathered every ten years as required by the Constitution. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!

The remainder of the leadership positions include a handful of chairs and assistantships.

(Credit: Library of Congress), “The people of these United States are the rightful masters of both congresses and courts, not to over-throw the Constitution, but to over-throw the men who pervert that Constitution.”[2], Many consider the 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas during the campaign for the U.S. Senate from Illinois to be one of the first debates to reach a national audience. Committee chairs are very powerful. Explain the division of labor in the House and in the Senate. The Constitution includes other powers such as the ability of Congress to override a presidential veto with a two-thirds vote of both houses (Article II, Section 7, in the case of the veto override). In this map, we see the changes in seat reapportionment that followed the 2010 Census. 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. In the Senate, committee hearings are also held to confirm presidential appointments.

While these delegates are not able to vote on legislation, they may introduce it and are able to vote in congressional committees and on procedural matters. A description of one of the debates can be found starting on page 386 of the article “Abraham Lincoln: A History.” Though Lincoln lost this election to Douglas, when he ran for president the next year he had the transcripts of the debate published and they were sold around the country. The upper house, the Senate, would have two representatives from each state. standing committee a permanent legislative committee that meets regularly. There are well over two hundred committees, subcommittees, select committees, and joint committees in the Congress. But with deadlocks and stalemates becoming more common, some quiet voices have begun asking for their return. However, today the average number of citizens in a congressional district now tops 700,000. Two remaining problems in the House are the size of each representative’s constituency—the body of voters who elect him or her—and the status of Washington, DC. Instead, the Constitution allows for the Senate to choose a president pro tempore—usually the most senior senator of the majority party—to preside over the Senate.

While the Capitol is the natural focus point of Capitol Hill and the workings of Congress, the Capitol complex includes over a dozen buildings, including the House of Representatives office buildings (left), the Senate office buildings (far right), the Library of Congress buildings (lower left), and the Supreme Court (lower right). In fact, the use of earmarks to encourage Republicans to help pass health care reform actually made the bill less popular with the public. The boundaries of legislative districts are redrawn as needed to balance the number of voters in each while still maintaining a total of 435 districts. Virginia and other large states felt it would be unfair to continue with this equal distribution of power if significant powers were to be added to the legislature to make laws in new areas. Each state is guaranteed at least one seat in the House. The report provides the majority opinion supporting the bill, a minority view to the contrary, and estimates of the proposed law’s cost and impact.

These powers are not granted to the Congress, or to any other branch of the government for that matter, but they exist because the country exists. A whip’s job, as the name suggests, is to whip up votes and otherwise enforce party discipline. apportionment the process by which seats in the House of Representatives are distributed among the fifty states, bicameralism the political process that results from dividing a legislature into two separate assemblies, bill proposed legislation under consideration by a legislature, constituency the body of voters, or constituents, represented by a particular politician, enumerated powers the powers given explicitly to the federal government by the Constitution to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, raise and support armies, declare war, coin money, and conduct foreign affairs, implied powers the powers not specifically detailed in the U.S. Constitution but inferred as necessary to achieve the objectives of the national government, inherent powers the powers neither enumerated nor implied but assumed to exist as a direct result of the country’s existence, oversight the right to review and monitor other bodies such as the executive branch, surge-and-decline theory a theory proposing that the surge of stimulation occurring during presidential elections subsides during midterm elections, accounting for the differences we observe in turnouts and results, collective representation the relationship between Congress and the United States as a whole, and whether the institution itself represents the American people, delegate model of representation a model of representation in which representatives feel compelled to act on the specific stated wishes of their constituents, descriptive representation the extent to which a body of representatives represents the descriptive characteristics of their constituencies, such as class, race, ethnicity, and gender, politico model of representation a model of representation in which members of Congress act as either trustee or delegate, based on rational political calculations about who is best served, the constituency or the nation, pork-barrel politics federal spending intended to benefit a particular district or set of constituents, representation an elected leader’s looking out for his or her constituents while carrying out the duties of the office, trustee model of representation a model of representation in which representatives feel at liberty to act in the way they believe is best for their constituents, conference committee a special type of joint committee that reconciles different bills passed in the House and Senate so a single bill results, joint committee a legislative committee consisting of members from both chambers that investigates certain topics but lacks bill referral authority, majority leader the leader of the majority party in either the House or Senate; in the House, the majority leader serves under the Speaker of the House, in the Senate, the majority leader is the functional leader and chief spokesperson for the majority party, minority leader the party member who directs the activities of the minority party on the floor of either the House or the Senate, president pro tempore the senator who acts in the absence of the actual president of the Senate, who is also the vice president of the United States; the president pro tempore is usually the most senior senator of the majority party, select committee a small legislative committee created to fulfill a specific purpose and then disbanded; also called an ad hoc, or special, committee, Speaker of the House the presiding officer of the House of Representatives and the leader of the majority party; the Speaker is second in the presidential line of succession, after the vice president, standing committee a permanent legislative committee that meets regularly, whip in the House and in the Senate, a high leadership position whose primary duty is to enforce voting discipline in the chambers and conferences, cloture a parliamentary process to end a debate in the Senate, as a measure against the filibuster; invoked when three-fifths of senators vote for the motion, filibuster a parliamentary maneuver used in the Senate to extend debate on a piece of legislation as long as possible, typically with the intended purpose of obstructing or killing it, markup the amending and voting process in a congressional committee, https://cnx.org/contents/W8wOWXNF@12.1:Y1CfqFju@5/Preface.