Structure of Congress

Congress comprises two chambers – The House of Representatives [Lower chamber] and the Senate [Upper chamber].

SENATE

[UPPER CHAMBER]

There are two senators from each state making a total of 100 congressional members in the chamber. Creating unequal representation between the STATES WITH LARGE AND SMALL POPULTIONS. A judge’s geographic location can influence his/her confirmation.

ELIGIBILITY

Senators serve for six years, must be a resident of the state for at least 9 years, and be 30 years old.

For instance, only the Senate confirms supreme court justices who are nominated by the President. If the Senate is under a southern majority rule, the hearing for the northern judge may never happen. The Senate leader determines what and when cases go up for a vote. This power creates a dead zone in government and an ineffective government for Americans.

Also, representation for each state is not based on its population. According to the Constitution, Oklahoma with a population of 535,000 gets two senators like California with a population of 8 million.

POWERS

The Senate takes action on bills, resolutions, amendments, motions, nominations, and treaties by voting. Senators vote in a variety of ways, including roll call votes, voice votes, and unanimous consent.

The Senate maintains several powers itself: It ratifies treaties by a two-thirds supermajority vote and confirms the appointments of the President by a majority vote. The consent of the House of Representatives is also necessary for the ratification of trade agreements and the confirmation of the Vice President.

The Reappointment Act passed in 1929 put limitations on 3 main responsibilities.

• • • • • Holding impeachment trials.
        • Approving treaties.
        • Approving presidential appointments to seats on the Supreme Court, in cabinets, and as ambassadors.

Also, they elect VP in event of a tie in the electoral college

Today, the Senate is controlled by the Democrats and the House by the Republicans who participated in or encouraged the coup, are anti-democracy, and are racist. Members of their party keep quiet in the midst of wrongdoing, and lack of moral judgment.

FLOOR LEADER

Serve as the spokesperson for their party’s positions on the issues and coordinate their respective.

With each new Congress, the Democratic and Republican Conferences elect one of their members to serve as party leader. Depending on which party is in power, one party leader serves as the majority leader and the other as the minority leader. Both party leaders, also called floor leaders, serve as the spokesperson for their party’s positions on the issues and coordinate their respective legislative strategies.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Working with the committee chairs and ranking members, the majority leader schedules business on the floor by calling bills from the calendar and keeps members of his or her caucus advised about the daily legislative program. In consultation with the minority leader, the majority leader fashions unanimous consent agreements by which the Senate may limit the amount of time for debate on a measure and divide that time between the parties.

Occupying the front-row desks on the center aisle in the Senate Chamber, the leaders pay close attention to floor action. They open and close the day’s proceedings, keep legislation moving, and protect the rights and interests of party members. When several senators are seeking recognition at the same time, the presiding officer of the Senate will call on the majority leader first, then on the minority leader, and then on the managers of the bill being debated. This right of first recognition enables the majority leader to offer amendments, substitutes, and motions to reconsider before any other senator.

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HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

[LOWER CHAMBER]

ELIGIBILITY

Qualifications: Live in the district for 7 years and be 25 years old. Serve for 2 years. There are 435 elected seats.

WHY 435?

Per the Constitution, the House of Representatives shall be composed of not more than two hundred and fifty (250) members, unless otherwise fixed by law, who shall be elected from legislative districts apportioned among the provinces, cities, and the Metropolitan Manila area in accordance with the number of their respective inhabitants, and on the basis of a uniform and progressive ratio, and those who, as provided by law, shall be elected through a party-list system of registered national, regional, and sectoral parties or organizations. The party-list representatives shall constitute twenty percent (20%) of the total number of representatives including those under the party list.

In 1929, the House passed the Permanent Apportionment Act, fixing the number of Representatives at 435. The U.S. Constitution called for at least one Representative per state and no more than one for every 30,000 persons. Thus, the size of a state’s House delegation depended on its population, members of the U.S. House of Representatives each represent a portion of their state known as a Congressional District, which averages 700,000 people. Senators however represent the entire state.

The House of Representatives has 435 voting Members and five nonvoting Delegates, each serving a two year term for the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the other non-voting member is a Resident Commissioner who serves for four years for Puerto Rico. The House of Representatives is referred to as the lower house of the United States Congress, because it has more Members than the Senate.

Apportionment, or the process of determining the number of seats each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives, happens like clockwork at this point. Every 10 years, the Census Bureau counts how many people each state has and then uses that number to calculate how many representatives each state gets out of the 435 seats.¹

There have been 435 seats in the House for so long now that it might seem as if the Founding Fathers had foreseen it as a natural ceiling for the chamber’s size. But that isn’t the case: 435 is entirely arbitrary. The House arrived at that number because of political expediency — and it has stayed there because of it, too.

Up until 1910, when the chamber expanded from 391 to 435 seats,⁴ the size of the House had experienced a mostly unchecked pattern of growth. Only once, after the 1840 census, did the number of seats in the House not increase; 1910, however, marked the last time the House grew, even though the U.S. population has more than tripled since then, from over 90 million in 1910 to over 330 million today.

POWERS

The House’s committees consider bills and issues and oversee agencies, programs, and activities within their jurisdictions. Its sole powers include:

1. Initiate revenue bills
2. Start impeachment of proceeding officers
3. Choose the President in the event of a tie in the Electoral College

The size of the House hasn’t increased in more than a century is a real problem for our democracy. For starters, there is an ever wider gulf between Americans and their representatives, as the average number of people represented in a district has more than tripled, from about 210,000 in 1910 to about 760,000 in 2020.³ Moreover, some states are severely over- and underrepresented as a result.

SPEAKER

The speaker of the United States House of Representatives, commonly known as the speaker of the House, is the presiding officer of the United States House of Representatives. The office was established in 1789 by Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution.

The Speaker of the House is by law second in line to succeed the President, after the Vice President, and the 25th Amendment makes the Speaker a part of the process announcing presidential disability.

The current Speaker, the Honorable Nancy Pelosi, is the 52nd individual to serve as Speaker of the House. In total, 54 Representatives have served as speakers. Seven individuals have served nonconsecutively: Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania, Henry Clay of Kentucky, John W. Taylor of New York, Thomas Brackett Reed of Maine, Sam Rayburn of Texas, Joseph Martin of Massachusetts, and Nancy Pelosi of California.

Duties

The Constitution mandates the office, but since the early 19th century the House and the individual Speakers have continually redefined its contours. Rooted in British parliamentary practice, the early Speakers limited their roles to presiding over the House and serving as its ceremonial head.

Over time, some Speakers aggressively pursued a policy agenda for the House while others have, in the words of Speaker Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, “come to this chair to administer [the] rules, but not as a partisan.” Regardless, the Speaker—who has always been (but is not required to be) a House Member with the same obligations to his or her constituents as the other 434 Members—is at the levers of power. The Speaker is simultaneously the House’s presiding officer, party leader, and the institution’s administrative head, among other duties.

SPECIFIC

• •  Administering the oath of office to the Members of the U.S. House of Representatives,
  • Giving Members permission to speak on the House floor,
  • Designating Members to serve as Speaker pro tempore,
  • Counting and declaring all votes,
  • Appointing Members to committees,
  • Sending bills

How long does the Speaker of the House serve?

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JOINT CHAMBERS

WHY A TWO-PARTY SYSTEM

Beginning in the 1820s, Democratic and Republicans in Congress were divided over questions about the powers of the federal government, which set the stage for two new political parties.

The politics of Congress have been defined by members’ affiliation with political parties. From the earliest days, politicians and the public have adopted a de facto 2-party political system. Membership in parties has at different times been defined by ideology, economics, rural/urban and geographic divides, religion, and populism.

POWERS

Although each chamber is assigned specific duties, joint responsibilities include: 

1. Lay and collect taxes
2. Set money value
3. Declare war
4. Govern territories

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HISTORY

ELECTION

States where commissions or courts drew maps either saw the percentage of competitive districts fall only marginally or even increase. Indeed, after the steep decline in competition in single-party controlled states, maps drawn by commissions or courts now account for almost 60 percent of the nation’s shrinking number of competitive districts. To be clear, independent commissions like those in Michigan and Colorado differ in important ways from the politician-appointed, bipartisan bodies in states like New Jersey and Montana, but they all require participation from both major political parties. When the commission states are considered together, there is only about a 15 percent decrease in the share of competitive seats, far less than the drop in competition that occurred in states where one party drew the map.

References: Quizlet, FiveThirtyEight, CONGRESS.GOV,

SENATE.GOV, WIKIPEDIA.ORG, HISTORY, ART & ARCHIVES