Congress, the Committees, and the House V.S. the Senate Essay

Congress is the legislative branch of our national government and shares power with the president as well as the Supreme Court. It has five fundamental functions, which include lawmaking, helping constituents, performing oversight, and educating the public,

Stemming from a loose interpretation of the Constitution – and specifically the necessary and proper clause -- congressional oversight is one of many enumerated powers bestowed upon Congress per Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. As the legislative body, Congress is charged with overseeing the inner workings of the Executive Branch and its federal agencies as a part of a system of checks and balances. However, as previously mentioned, this power is one of the implied powers of Congress, thus making it very difficult for many to delineate rightful oversight from reckless meandering. In the Constitution, for example, there is no singular mention of a definitive power such as “congressional oversight.” Consequently, there is no

An important point made in Weissert and Weissert concerning Congress and its committee structure is that the majority of the work in Congress is done through committees. They perform the majority of research on issues and possible solutions, get legislation written, re-written and amended, and support it as it moves through Congress and finally gets passed. They are the “workhorses of the legislature” (Weissert and Weissert, 29).

Congress plays an important role in ruling the United States. Congress job is to represent the citizens of the U.S. by sharing the power with the current president of the United States of America and Supreme Court. Congress is one of the three branches of the United States. One of the main Congress jobs is to make law, basically, America without the Congress is pretty much without no laws. The Congress today is suffering from partisanship, parties are not working together as one hand causing it to fail its job. The Republicans are now controlling the Senate ( both houses ) when they earned it in 2014 elections making the majority Republican in Congress. Some people believe that the Congress is a broken branch and how it is failing America and we need to get it back on track. While the other believe that the Congress is fine and doing it job. I believe that the Congress is a broken branch since the United States of American government has a lot of partisanship.

Congress functioned as a legislative body to pass laws and executive body to enforce them if needed.

The purpose of the legislative committee is to come up with a compromise when a bill is proposed to the Senate and House of Representatives. They decide if they go through with a bill or they don’t or if they need to make amendments to the bill and compromise with each other. There is a standing committee which is a permanent selection of people that has legislative jurisdiction they consider bills and issues then recommend any changes that they see need to be made. They have a responsibility to monitor agencies, programs and activities that are within their jurisdictions. The standing committees recommend funding levels, authorization for the government operations and for new and existing programs. The second committee is a select committee;

Committees and Campaign Promises The Texas House of Representatives serves a key role throughout the law-making process, but who exactly decides what bills pass or do not pass? Well, that is where things start to get complicated as there are various departments that must approve each bill before it is passed. Any congress member can propose a bill, but then it must be assigned to the proper committee for further evaluation. According to Ross Ramsey with the Texas Tribune, only about 23 percent of Texas bills get passed as 1,726 out of 7,419 bills were passed in 2009. That means that as a legislator, one must choose to serve the committees that best suits their

The United States Congress is made up of two chambers the House of Representatives and the Senate. All together there are 485 congress people that come together to alter current laws or suggest new legislation. They are required to meet once per year on January 3 by the US Constitution, but they come together much more often than that. Their sessions can last months if the topic is very controversial. US legislation is slow and at times painfully inefficient. In order to make new legislation, the Congress has to go through a long process of getting a majority in the house as well as the Senate, and even after all that the President still has to approve of the bill in question. An example of this is the Healthcare bill that Barack Obama successfully passed in during his first term as President. He had to fight in order to get the reform passed, persuade the members of Congress that his bill should even be considered, and after all that the Supreme Court almost ruled that the legislation was unconstitutional. The US Congress is a headache on its best day. The system is set up to create gridlock and for the past 200 years it has works.

The most significant power that congress has is to create and pass legislation. Most of the creation is down to congressional committees - specialist groups of congressman who revise and investigate laws into their own committee's interests, for example The House Science Committee. Some of the legislation can

Committees can be made up of 20 to 50 representatives (Wasserman, 2015. p.104). Committees help the Senate and House to deal with more issues and go through them quickly by breaking them off into assigned groups for reviewing and decision over what to do with the bill. By doing this, Committees do most of the work of the House and the Senate. According to Wasserman (2015) committees are, “vital for creating legislation and providing specialized instruments for doing Congress’s business” (p.92).

A member of congress is split between making decision on-behalf of the two constituents that he serves: those at home and his colleagues within congress (Fenno sources). He cannot be at two places at once, nor equally impact the lives of both constituents. He has the option to be accountable to the demands/policy interest of, either, his home constituents or those on the Hill (Fenno).

To find out what powers that Congress has, you need to look at the Constitution. To find the Congressional powers in the Constitution, you’ll need to look at Article 1, Section 8. There you will

Congress retains a number of special powers. It can act as a judicial body to impeach and try a president or other civil officer for misconduct. For example, the House of Representatives impeaches the official and Senate does a trial. Congress is also empowered to create and use administrative agencies and boards, such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, to determine facts and to enforce its

The main functions of Congress are: lawmaking, budgetary, and oversight. Lawmaking is when only the members of Congress can introduce a bill for consideration. “Approximately 10,500 bills were introduced during the 112th session, and Congress voted fewer than 150 into a law (O'Connor).” The budgetary function is enumerated in the constitution, submitted by the President and approved by congress. The oversight function is hearings and investigations of mostly executive actions, impeachment process to remove federal officials from

It would be as foolish to assume that a committee can know and understand a full piece of legislation as it would be to assume that individual members of Congress would. For this purpose, subcommittees are formed. Subcommittees are a further delegation of tasking within the review of legislation. Valerie Heitshusen, an analyst on Congress wrote, “Most committees form subcommittees to share specific tasks within the jurisdiction of the full Committee” (Committee Types and Roles 3). Subcommittees are expected to present their finding on their assigned area of a bill. They, along with experts (witnesses) testify before the full committee on their findings. After the full committee considers the subcommittees’ findings, a vote is taken as to whether or not the bill goes to the chamber.