 Chapter 3, Congress. Okay, so the U.S. has a bicameral legislature, and what that means is that our Congress has two houses to it, the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. And so we talked a little bit about why the U.S. has a bicameral legislature in the last lecture, the last two lectures actually. So remember that during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 there was a disagreement between the larger states and the smaller states over what type of legislature the new U.S. governments have under the U.S. Constitution. And so remember the smaller states wanted a legislature where every state would have an equal number of representatives. So they wanted a legislature based on equal representation, whereas the larger states, the more populated states, thought that was unfair and thought that because they had more population, they should also have more representation. And so what they wanted was a legislature based on proportional representation where each state would have a different number of representatives, a number based on the number of people living in the state. So the more people living in the state, the more representatives it would have in the Congress. So in an effort to resolve that argument, the states decided to have a compromise, what we call the great compromise, and thus create a bicameral legislature, a Congress with two houses that has the representatives and the Senate. The House of Representatives is based on proportional representation, meaning that every state has a number of representatives based on the number of people living in the state. So larger states like New York, California, Texas, Florida, have more representatives in the House than smaller states like Rhode Island or Delaware. In the Senate, the other House of the Congress representation is equal. So you have equal representation in the Senate. Every state has the same number of representatives too. So there are 50 states today, there are 100 senators. Every state has two. There are 435 members of the House. However, the House is much bigger than the Senate. And the 435 members are distributed according to population. So New York, again New York, Florida, Texas, California have many more representatives than smaller states like Rhode Island or Delaware. So because each state has the same number of senators too, and because a senator from a state represents the entire state, not just part of the state, but the entire state, when senators are up for election, as they will be next November, when you go to vote in a state, the whole state gets to vote for the same candidates for Senate. So here in New York, let's say one of our senators, Chuck Schumer, is up for reelection in November. When Chuck Schumer runs next November, everybody in New York will get to vote in that election, either for Chuck Schumer or for whoever's running against him. It doesn't matter whether you live in Buffalo or whether you live in on Staten Island or in Harlem. Everybody votes for the same set of Senate candidates. And the House is a little bit different because a member of the House of Representatives doesn't represent the entire state that he or she is from. Instead, members of the House of Representatives represent only part of a state, what's called a congressional district. And so each state is cut up into the same number of congressional districts as there are representatives in the House of Representatives. So let's say New York has 30 members of the House of Representatives. New York will then also have 30 congressional districts, and everybody living in New York lives in one of those congressional districts. And so when you go to vote, you don't get to vote for every single representative who's running for election in New York. You only get to vote for the representative race in your district. So for example, I live in New York's 12th congressional district. I live in Astoria, so congressional district number 12 in New York is made up of Astoria, Green Point, Brooklyn, part of Williamsburg, and then the east side of Manhattan. And so my representative is Caroline Maloney. She represents the 12th District of New York. So when she goes up for the election in November and she's running against whoever's running against her, only the people who live in the 12th congressional district of New York will vote in that election. If you live in let's say Crown Heights, you live in a different congressional district represented by a different member of Congress. And then so therefore you'll be voting in a different election for a different set of candidates to choose from in next November's election. Okay, so the House of Representatives members of the House only represent a portion of the other state, what's called a congressional district, while senators represent the entire state. So we have two senators in New York, Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer. Both of them represent the entire state of New York, not just a congressional district, but the entire state. Both chambers of Congress, the House of Representatives, and the Senate are organized by political party membership. So we have two main political parties in the United States, Democrats and Republicans. Most, but not all, most of the members of the Congress are either Democrats or Republicans. There are a couple of independents, but most of them are either Democrats or Republicans. Each chamber is led by a member of the political party that holds more seats in that chamber. So whichever party has more seats in the House of the Congress controls that House of the Congress. So for example, right now there are more Republican senators in the U.S. Senate than our Democratic senators. So that means that the Republicans control the Senate. The Republicans basically make decisions about what the Senate is going to vote on, what we're not vote on, and because they have more members, if all their members vote the same way, then only really, the only legislation, the only laws that the Senate will pass are laws that the Republican party wants to have passed. Democrats and the minority in the Senate, and they don't really have that much of a say because of that. In the House of Representatives, it's completely the opposite because the Democrats have more members in the House than Republicans. So in the House, it's the Democrats who have control. So they make the decisions about what gets voted on, or what doesn't get voted on, what comes up for debate, what doesn't come up for debate. And so because the House of Representatives controlled by Democrats, the leader of the House, the person we'd call the Speaker of the House, is a Democrat. And right now that's Representative Nancy Pelosi, who's a Democrat from California. She is the head of the House, what we call the Speaker of the House. And the Speaker of the House is a very important person, not just because Nancy Pelosi gets to decide what sort of laws the House is going to pass or not pass, what kind of issues are going to debate. But under the Constitution, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, is third in line to succeed the President if anything should happen to the President. So under the Constitution, if anything were to happen to President Trump and President Trump were not able to perform his duties as President either on a temporary basis or a permanent basis, then Vice President Mike Pence would become President either temporarily or permanently. However, something happens to both President Trump and Vice President Pence at the same time. Well, if something were to happen to both of them, then Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, would become President under the rules of succession that are laid out in the Constitution. The head of the Senate is called the Majority Leader. He is the head of the Majority Party, which today is the Republicans. And right now, the Majority Leader of the Senate is Mitch McConnell, a Senator from Kentucky, a Republican Senator from Kentucky. All right. So what do members of Congress do? They basically have four main functions. They legislate, which means to make laws. They represent the interests of the constituents, constituents are the people who they represent, the people who live either in the congressional district in the case of members of the House of Representatives, or people who live in their state in the case of senators. They conduct oversight, and lastly, they solve constituent problems. So let's take each of these one by one and talk about this in more detail. Okay. So the first one, Congress's main function and its most important function is to legislate, which means to make laws. It does this through a committee system. So both Houses of Congress, the Houses of Representatives, and Senate is comprised of different committees. And each committee is a group of representatives or senators who are responsible for starting the process of passing a law for whatever topic that committee specialty is. So there are many, many different committees in both Houses of Congress, and each of these committees is focused on one particular issue. So for example, in both the Senate and the House, there's what's called a banking committee. So any kind of law or any kind of issue that has to do with banking or finance or money is the responsibility of the banking committee. So if the Congress is thinking about creating a new banking law, the first group of representatives who will start working on that proposal for a new banking law is the banking committee, because they're the ones who have experience and knowledge about banking and about finance, about these kinds of issues to make a good law. So they're the ones who actually produce the proposal for the law, which is called a bill. A bill before a law gets passed, it's called a bill. A bill is a proposal for a law. So if the banking committee and the Houses of Representatives creates a new banking proposal, a new banking law proposal, a new banking bill, they produce it out of their committee, they write it, they vote on it, and if they approve it, then they present it to the entire House of Representatives, or in the case of Senate, if the Senate banking committee does the same thing, they present it to the Senate, and then the whole Senate and the whole House will vote on it. So a bill, a proposal for law, starts in the committee. If the committee votes on it and approves it, it gets presented to the whole House, either the House or Senate, whichever one you're talking about, and if the House or Senate vote on it and approve it, then it becomes official. The bill gets passed. Now, before a bill becomes a law, two things need to happen. It needs to be passed by both the House and Senate together, not just one or the other, but both, because we have a bicameral legislature, both Houses need to pass a bill before it can be sent to the next step, which is to be presented to the President. So the bill starts off in committee, it gets passed by the committee, it gets passed by the House, by the Senate, and then it goes to the President. Okay, why the President? Because this is part of the idea of checks and balances that I've talked about in the past two lectures, the idea that the Founding Fathers did not want any one branch of government to have too much power. So they created a system of checks and balances where each branch can stop another branch from doing something that it thinks is wrong and shares power to do certain things like, in this case, passing laws. So part of the checks and balance system is that Congress and the President need to work together and need to agree before a law can get passed. So in order for a law to get passed, and the bill needs to be passed through the committee of a congressional House, and then it needs to get passed by the full branch of the Congress, the House does it, and then the Senate does it, and then the bill, if passed by both the House and Senate, goes to the President for his signature. And the President agrees with the bill, he can sign it, and then it automatically becomes law as soon as the President signs it. Okay, now one other thing to mention before we go, before we go any further is that in order to pass a bill in the House and Senate, all you need is what's called a simple majority, meaning more members need to vote yes on it than no. So in the Senate, for example, which has 100 senators, if 51 senators vote yes on a bill, it passes. 51 is one more than half of 100. Okay, so if a simple majority in the House says yes, the simple majority of the Senate also says yes, then the bill goes to the President and if the President says yes, he signs it, and it becomes law. Now what if the President doesn't agree with the bill, doesn't want it to become law, well then under the theory of checks and balances, he can stop the bill from becoming law, he can prevent the bill from becoming law by not signing it, and what we call that is a veto. A veto is basically a way of saying no, I don't agree with this bill and then the bill doesn't pass. Now if the President vetoes a bill that doesn't end the bill's life right then and there, Congress can still pass the bill a second time, overriding the objection of the President or overriding the veto, which is what we officially call it, call it when Congress passes a bill the second time after the President has vetoed, it's called overriding the veto, but in order to do that the Congress needs to pass the bill not just by simple majority but by two-thirds majority. So in the Senate for example, two-thirds majority would be 67. So if the Senate passes a bill the first time by a certain majority 51, and the President vetoes it, it goes back to the Senate, this time the Senate has to pass it by a vote of 67, 16 more senators need to vote yes. That's a lot, that's a much higher number, and because of that it's not often that a presidential veto is overridden. It has happened, it can happen, but it doesn't happen often. So really in order for a bill to become a law, in order for laws to get made, you really have to have an agreement between not just the 2000s of Congress, the House and the Senate, but also the President. And because of that especially when you have what we call mixed government where the President is from one party and at least one of the House of Congress is from the other, you really need to have a negotiation process where the Congress and the President can decide on a bill, a proposal that they all agree with. And that's what we have today, we have a mixed government today where the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party but the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party and we have a President of the Republican Party. So if you watch the news a lot or if you read the newspaper you'll often hear that laws that are passed are the result of sometimes very difficult very long negotiations between the House, the Senate and the President. Now in addition to being able to pass laws the Senate also has a consultative confirmation authority and this is only the Senate not the House but just the Senate has a consultative confirmation authority and what this means is that the Senate gets to confirm cabinet secretaries, agency directors, ambassadors, federal judges, Supreme Court justices and treaties that are proposed by the President. So and what I mean by confirm is to prove of. So under our present system of government the President has the right to appoint his own cabinet secretaries like the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Treasury. He has the right to appoint his own agency directors like the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has the right to appoint his own ambassadors, the ambassador to England for example. These are people who represent the United States to foreign governments around the world. The President has the right to appoint federal judges and Supreme Court justices, members of the judiciary and Presidents also have the right to negotiate and sign treaties with other countries. A treaty is a formal agreement between the United States and a foreign country but because again because of the idea of checks and balances the Founding Fathers wanted to make sure that the President did not have the complete ability to appoint all these kinds of people and to solely have the right to make treaties with foreign countries in order to put a check on the President. The Founding Fathers gave the Senate the right to confirm these people and the right to confirm treaties. So for example when President Trump a couple years ago appointed two new members of the Supreme Court, two new Supreme Court justices, first Neil Gorsuch and then Brett Kavanaugh, he was able to appoint them and say these are my choices for the Supreme Court. This is who I want to put on there but they didn't actually become Supreme Court justices until the Senate went through a process of debating whether they should be on the court and voting to decide whether they should be on the court and in both cases the Senate voted yes to agree to have them be Supreme Court justices but if they had voted no and said we don't think these two judges are the right people they would not have become Supreme Court justices so the Senate has to agree, has to confirm to let these people be appointed to their positions and they also have to, the Senate also has to agree whether a treaty should become American law so the President can negotiate a treaty with a foreign country, the President can sign a treaty with a foreign country but that treaty doesn't become law until the Senate also agrees. So the Senate's function here is only to confirm the President's appointees, they cannot choose who a Supreme Court justice will be, they can only vote yes or no on the person selected by the President so the President appoints and then the Senate votes yes or no on that appointment if in the case of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh if the Senate has said no we don't approve of them to be on the Supreme Court then the President would have would have had to choose another Supreme Court justice appointee so the Senate cannot do that, the Senate can only vote yes or no on the people chosen by the President. Okay both chains of Congress also form the second main function of Congress which is to represent the interests of their constituents by advocating for laws and actions that benefit the people they represent so one of the main functions of a of a Senator or member of the House is to represent the interests of the constituents which basically means to look out for them to make sure that the American government and the Congress in particular are doing things that are good for their people and since we have such a diverse country in terms of population and geographic areas the way that a member of Congress from Chicago thinks about representing the interests of the constituents is very different than say a member of Congress from a rural part of Texas because the interests of people who live in Chicago are very different than the people who live the interests of the people who live in a rural area of Texas that's one of the reasons why we have so many different members of Congress representing different congressional districts from around the country so that different the different interests of people living in different parts of the country can be represented well in the government so how uh how members of Congress do this is uh varies from state to state and from congressional district to congressional district your textbook uses the example of Congressman Norton Dixon the member of of the House of Representatives who represents a congressional district in Seattle, Washington now Seattle is home to a lot of military interests there are a lot of naval bases military bases and Congressman Dixon's district is also the home to the Bone Corporation which in addition to making commercial airplanes also makes a lot of military uh airplanes and hardware for the U.S. government so a big portion of uh Bone's business is with the U.S. government with the U.S. military and Boeing is a large corporation uh employs a lot of people in Congressman Dixon's district and in order to keep those jobs alive what Bone needs is business from the uh from the U.S. government to to build more planes and more military hardware all who decides uh what kind of military hardware gets built who decides how much money to give to the military to buy uh weapons and other things from Boeing it's the U.S. Congress uh one of the main functions of the U.S. Congress is to decide how the government's budget uh is made and uh how much money is spent in that budget uh the budget is primarily not the President's responsibility he has part of the responsibility but the main responsibility of deciding what the budget is going to be how much money is going to be in the budget where money gets spent is in Congress so since the Congress decides uh how much money Bone is going to get from the U.S. government uh Congressman Norm Dixon has made sure that he's on the House of Representatives committees that deal with military budgets so that he can have a direct influence a direct decision-making uh role in the kind of budget that that the U.S. military gets and how much money the U.S. military gives to Boeing because as I said before the more money Bone gets uh the uh more jobs that there are in Congressman Dixon's district and if he can run for election every two years and say that well you know I've got I you know I've I've been very successful in getting money for Boeing uh I made sure that Congress has has given a lot of money to the budget for Boeing and uh that's translated into more and more jobs for the people who live in my district from my constituency well that's good for Norm Dixon because if the members of his uh constituency the people living in his district are happy they're going to be happy with him and they're going to keep voting for him and he's going to hold on to his job and so that's very good okay that's that's a good thing okay uh and one other thing I forgot to mention when I talked about how the Congress set up before uh members of the House of Representatives serve for a two-year term in office so uh every two years they run for election uh members of the Senate serve for six years so uh senators serve for a much longer term in office than uh than representatives okay so uh the third function of Congress is uh to have oversight authority to conduct oversight of the other parts of the government what does oversight mean oversight means to supervise and make sure that the other parts of the government are functioning well to make sure that uh the other parts of the governor doing what they're supposed to do uh to make sure that uh there are no mistakes made uh that can cause a lot of of harm and to make sure that there's no corruption uh so how does Congress oversee what the other branches do uh it does this a performance function by conducting investigations and holding hearings so for example if uh if it if it becomes known that uh something wrong happened that that the uh president did something wrong or is is uh is thought to have done something wrong then the Congress can conduct an investigation and they can hold hearings to try to find out if something actually did go wrong and to find out why who was responsible how did this happen uh what it means to hold hearings is to have a committee whatever committee is responsible for that issue whatever issue you're talking about hold a hearing uh in public these are usually on tv you can watch them when they happen and at these hearings Congress will call the people who are involved in whatever happened to come and explain why why things happen to answer questions uh and they can also request documentation from from whatever the other part of the government is involved to find out what happened uh and the idea the the goal of these investigations is to try to get to the bottom of the truth to find out what happened and ultimately to make sure that doesn't happen again to change whatever process or system or law needs to be changed to make sure that whatever happened either by accident or willful corruption does not happen again and uh if Congress thinks that uh another branch of the government did something that's really really really bad they can actually move to take punitive action against say the president uh by trying to remove him from office which is called impeachment uh in under the constitution uh the congress has the right to try to remove the president through what's called impeachment which basically means to charge the president with wrongdoing with with serious wrongdoing uh it's a two-step process that involves both chambers of congress uh the first uh part of the process is for the hassle of representatives to impeach the president to formally charge the president with wrongdoing and then uh in the second part of the process the president is put on trial in the senate so instead of going to court there's a trial in the us senate and the hundred senators act as a jury and they have to vote on whether whether they think the president is guilty or not guilty if the president is found guilty of wrongdoing then the president is removed from office if the president is found not guilty then he is not removed uh you might remember that this happened earlier this year when the congress that has represented impeach the president uh for certain wrongdoing involving ukraine uh and uh he was charged with a crime he was put on trial in the senate but the senate ultimately found him not guilty and so the president uh president trump is still president because the congress failed to find him guilty so that's how investigations and hearings work and what they're designed to do ultimately congress also under its oversight authority can also create what's called the special independent commission if they want to deal with something if they want to investigate something but not have it be very political meaning not have them themselves do the investigation they will put together a group of experts uh who are outside of the government to conduct the investigation now most often the people who are appointed to this independent commissions uh have previously served in government but usually they don't serve in government at the time so this kind of the idea is to hopefully remove the uh the investigation from uh being so political to being not so political and so uh a very famous example of of uh of a special independent commission that congress once created was the 9-11 commission about a year after the 9-11 attacks on new york and washington the congress decided to create an independent commission to try to investigate how the 9-11 attacks could happen how they uh how they were uh planned out who was involved who was responsible and most importantly uh how it is that the u.s. government did not catch it and was not able to stop before it happened uh the idea here was not to uh blame anybody not to uh charge in all of the crime but rather to investigate and find the truth in a non-political way so congress decided rather than they conducting the investigation themselves they created a special independent commission uh with a lot of experts in the area of foreign policy and national security intelligence uh and it was led by uh a democrat and a republican uh thomas kane uh led the commission he was a former uh president i mean a former governor of new jersey okay uh so that's uh that's how congress uh conducts uh oversight and the last uh thing that uh both chambers do uh is help solve constituent problems they're both able to help solve constituent problems and what do we mean by this it means that a problem that one of their constituents one of the people that they represent either in their state or in their congressional district might be having with a with the u.s. government uh with a u.s. uh agency uh so let's say for example that uh i'm a uh i own a company uh in uh new york city and my company uh uh is involved in the import export business so uh i import goods from other parts of the world and sell them here and i export goods from the united states to other parts of the world and i sell i sell them there uh so uh in order to do that in order to import certain things from other countries into the united states or to sell to ship things out of the united states to sell it into other countries you need what's called an import uh unit license either an import license or an export license uh and this uh uh is usually given well it's given by various uh agency of the u.s. government uh but let's say for example that one of the uh agencies that i need to get an export license from is this is the u.s. state department to get a license to sell something uh outside of the united states so uh let's say for example that i apply for an export license to the state department to get uh permission to sell goods to other parts of the world and usually it takes about three weeks to get an export license and uh but three weeks have passed and i haven't gotten my license i call up and nobody can give me a straight answer uh i'm getting uh uh you know i'm getting ignored so what can i do about it well i can call my member of congress or my senator to try to get them to help me solve this problem well what can they do well they can look into it they can call up the state department they can investigate uh and try to uh get the matter solved now why would the state department pay any more attention no member of congress or senator than me well because unlike me members of congress and senate members of the house and senate uh make decisions about how much money the state department should get in their budget uh they make laws that either help or hurt the state department they uh senators can vote to confirm appointees of the president to state department uh so uh chuck schumer my senator may call the state department say look you know if you don't have a good reason to deny my constituent this export license you know you better given the license or else i'm going to potentially cause problems for you uh you want to delay him i'll delay you too and and and you won't be happy so uh you know just like very important people members of congress the senators get their phone calls uh answered more readily than if you or i would have called the state department uh and uh they frankly get more respect than you or i from the state department or any other part of the uh government so members of congress can often be of great help if someone's having a legitimate problem with uh a sector of the us government the federal government so if you want to contact your member of congress or your senator you can go to the internet and do it easily if you click on this link here find your representative uh it'll take you to the uh us has to represent his website house.gov and if you just uh punch in your input my zip code here click find your rep by zip and here we go my representative as i said before is caroline maloney she's a democrat from uh from the 12th district of new york right here is located in the 12th congressional district of new york and this uh green area here is the is the 12th district new york Astoria uh the son of manhattan and parts of williamsburg and green point okay and so uh you've got her phone number right here that you can call her office uh you can uh you can email her her and uh subscribe to her newsletter uh here services here help with a vertical agency right what i was talking about before okay so uh and also another thing that they can help with is immigration cases right so you can uh call uh the office and get somebody to try to help you with an immigration case if that's what you need okay all right so uh we go back uh find your senator and this takes you to the senate's website senate.gov and uh if you choose your state new york and here are our two senators from new york all right chris and jillibrand char schumer if i want to contact char schumer here i go right how can char schumer help again request with a help with a federal agency uh and uh help for new yorkers uh so you can uh do a lot here uh students there are internships for example in his office so uh if you uh are a college student and you want to uh do an internship in chuck schumer's office you can contact the office apply for an internship okay so there are all sorts of things that you can do uh okay so uh that's the end of chapter uh three uh until next time