Is Congress for us or just against each other?
Congress is bicameral where we have a House of Representatives and a Senate. There are differences in how each house runs but there are similarities as well. The House of representatives is made up of 435 representatives, where each state has a set number of representatives based on their population. These numbers are updated every ten years when a new census is done and released. The house’s seats are up for election every two years. Typically, the candidate for house seats are seen as following the delegate ideology when creating their campaign. They tend to support policies and laws that are support by the majority of the people in their district. The house tends to have stricter rules when running their discussions where there is a majority leader who runs the meetings and keeps the house from having a chaotic discussion. What they discuss is scheduled into the calendar so they can make their time efficient as possible. The Senate on the other hand is run a little differently. Their seats are up for reelection every 6 years, and there are only two seats for every state no matter the population. They represent the whole state and can either take the delegate ideology or the trustee ideology which is where they make decisions on policy based on their beliefs and what they think is best for the people they represent. They tend to start with the trustee but as reelection comes around they turn to the delegate ideology. With less people in the Senate, they have more relaxed rules. They are allowed open discussion on any bill they want to talk about. They also have leaders, but they do not play as prominent roles as the leader in the House of Representatives. As stated in the textbook, Senators are seen as the more powerful, prestigious, and visible than representatives in the house. The house and Senate are similar in certain aspects but also differ in their norms and organization. Overall their main goal is to make America better by passing laws and bills necessary to better American policy.
The common question that always occurs when election time rolls around for senate or house is who will maintain the majority in congress. This starts the question, if congress is more caught up in their own political party battles rather than helping the American people. There are many times where the political parties hold the majority of one house and not the other. This leads to problems when passing bills. Each house takes a bill and votes and amends the bill until it can get passed through their respected camber of congress. Then before sending it to the president to get the final approval, the two bills must be combined into one that can again get passed and accepted through both houses. For instant if the republican party holds the majority in the senate and the democrats hold majority of the House of Representatives, when the bills get combined the parties have to compromise, but not all representatives may be willing to accept these changes. This holds the bill from being passed because it is required to go through multiple amendments until all 535 representatives in congress can agree upon it. We can see this today with the budget plan for the United States and with many health care bills or repeals trying to be passed. Currently, there are over 7,626 bills and resolutions before congress. In this session of congress that started January 3rd 2017, 1% of bill that have been discussed ended up becoming enact laws, 4% passed resolutions, and 5% that have been through revisions that are trying to still get passed through both chambers. Research shows that there is a strong correlation of political parties stacking certain committees to try and have a better chance of a bill being passed. A bill will only reach the floor of the houses when a committee has brought it up to be placed on the schedule. Stacking the committees with a specific party will liken the chance of the bill moving farther and quicker in congress and has a strong potential to be enacted as a law. With the parties concerned about what bills will be passed and strategically planning who gets placed in what committee to pass a bill, it questions congress’s true intentions. Are they here to pass the bills that will help Americans, or that will satisfy their parties. In the end, Congress has been able to pass bills that have positively and negatively impacted the United States. The efficiency of how these bills are passed are questioned when the media portrays the differences and power struggle between congress’s chambers every election more than the bills themselves.