Congress

I.                   The Powers of Congress

A.    Differences between Parliament and Congress

1.      Parliament—Members of Parliament (MPs) are usually more loyal to party leaders, who selected them for the offices they hold, since voters in a parliamentary government generally vote for a party rather than an individual. MPs who buck the government face the danger of not being re-nominated for the positions they hold.

2.      Congress—Congress is an assemblage of elected representatives empowered to make laws, but not to select the chief executive of the nation. A parliament is an assemblage of elected officials who both pass laws and select the nation’s chief executive (usually called the Prime Minister).

B.     Constitutional Powers of Congress—found in Article 1, Section 8 of the Consitution:

1.      To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises.

2.      To borrow money.

3.      To regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the states.

4.      To establish rules for naturalization and bankruptcy.

5.      To coin money, set its value, and punish counterfeiting.

6.      To fix the standard of weights and measures

7.      To establish a post office and post roads.

8.      To issue patents and copyrights to inventors and authors.

9.      To created courts inferior to the Supreme Court.

10.  To define and punish piracies, felonies on the high seas, and crimes against the rule of the laws of nature.

11.  To declare war.

12.  To raise and support an army and a navy and make rules for their governance.

13.  To provide for a militia (reserving to the states the right to appoint militia officers and to train the militia under congressional rules).

14.  To exercise exclusive legislative power over the seat of government (the District of Columbia) and over places purchased to be federal facilities (forts, arsenals, dockyards, and “other needful buildings”)

15.  To “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States. This “necessary and proper” or “elastic” clause has been broadly interpreted by the Supreme Court.

II.                The Evolution of Congress

A.    A Bicameral Body—the US Congress consists of two legislative bodies—the House, where legislators are elected for two-year terms, and the Senate, where members serve staggered six year terms

1.      House of Representatives—members have to stand for election every two years. The Framers selected this relatively short term—although it was longer than most state legislative terms were—in order to keep representatives closest to the people they are suppose to represent. Legislation that involves taxation has to “begin” in this body (that is, when the President wishes to raise or lower taxes, s/he must find a sponsoring representative to “introduce” the legislation. The number of Representatives each state is granted in the House is determined by the population of the state from the decennial census.

2.      Senate—Currently, Senators are elected for 6-years terms—but the terms for the Senators are “staggered,” so that only one-third of the body comes up for re-election every two years. When originally conceived by the Framers, Senators were not directly elected by the people, but by state legislatures. This remained the practice until the passage of the 17^th Amendment in 1913, which changed the Constitution to allow for the direct election of Senators. The Senate was envisioned by the Framers as a more deliberative body than the House of Representatives, and was meant to be a brake on what the Framers feared was the excesses of democracy; in some ways today, it has moved to become a millstone around the neck of democracy, particularly since the changes in the use of the filibuster in the last decade or so.

3.      Checks and Balances in Congress—The Senate is, or course, meant to be a check on the House of Representatives, to ensure that no radically democratic legislation is passed. The qualifications to become a senator require more maturity (five years more, in fact—while one can be elected to the House at age 25, one had to be at least 30 to be elected to the Senate),  and the initial stipulation that required a senator to be elected by the state legislature also meant that someone elected to the Senate had some standing in his home state.

4.      Lack of Strong Central Leadership—while in a parliamentary system, the leader of the party in power provides a great deal of leadership, the congressional system is much more decentralized. This was meant by the Framers to ensure that no one person had too much political power, and the independence of individual members was to be protected.

B.     Who Serves in Congress?—Membership in the House of Representatives is fixed by law at 435 members, apportioned among the states according to population as determined by the decennial census. Each state has at least one representative, but beyond that representation is completely determined by population. In the Senate, each state is allocated two senators, and their election is staggered so that a state will not have two new senators in any given term. Most of the 535 members of Congress are middle-aged white males. Nearly one-half of the membership of the 111^th Congress ( 245 members—which was down from the 261 members from the previous Congress) are millionaires.

1.      Years of service—the emergence of the “career politician” (which I argue precedes the 1950s that Wilson cites in his text) gave greater power to those politicians whose seniority gave them prized positions an powerful committees—often as the chair, who got to set the agenda of the committee.

a.       Term-limits—a popular cause of the 1990s, which was suppose to rid us of the scourge of the “career politician.” In practice, term-limits has largely created a game of musical chair among the career politicians, who simply exchange positions—while empowering an unelected bureaucracy and ideological think tanks to actually write legislation (which is how we ended up with laws like Senate Bill 5).

2.      Party—the tendency of voters to return incumbents (even today, while people hold historically low opinions of Congress, they believe their own Congressional representative is the exception), the New Deal coalition of the Democratic Party was able to hold sway in Congress for nearly 50 years.

a.       Incumbency—with the extended postwar expansion (in part due to the implementation of the New Deal), incumbency was an asset. When that began to fall apart in the 1970s—coupled with the scandals of Watergate, and then several Congressional scandals including Abscam and the Keating Five (senators who introduced legislation deregulating the Savings and Loan industry in the early 1980s at the behest of a man named Charles Keating, who owned a large savings and loan, whose subsequent failure precipitated a financial crisis in the late 1980s), Democrats became the whipping boys for the “problems” that beset Washington.

C.     Getting Elected to Congress—Necessitates winning an election, and getting more votes than your opponent. This usually also necessitates having the backing of one of the major parties—Democratic or Republican—in your state. In the past, this was generally accomplished by running for local offices, using the experience and connections made to then run for state office, and then parlaying that experience and broader connections to run for national office. The increased frustration that many people feel toward career politicians has opened the door to the super-rich who can self-finance their campaigns, because some how these super-rich will better represent the interests of “regular” people.

D.    The Organization of Congress: Parties and Interests—both parties in the House and the Senate are organized by party leaders, who themselves are elected by the party membership in both bodies.

1.      Party Organizations—while the party with the majority of members chooses the leader of the Senate—called the president pro tempore of the Senate—real power in that body lies with the Majority Leader, who schedules the business of the Senate and therefore decides which legislation the Senate will consider, and when that will be done. The Majority Leader is assisted in the legislative process by a Majority Whip, who is responsible for advising the Majority Leader when the majority party has enough votes to pass legislation. In the Senate, legislation is usually advanced in consultation with the Minority Leader, in part because of the obstacles the minority party can use (like the filibuster) delay or kill legislation. In the House of Representatives, the Speaker—elected by the majority—sets the legislative agenda.

E.     Party Voting—Because the parties today—particularly the Republican Party—are more ideologically driven than in just about any other time period in the last 100 years, much of the comity that had existed in both legislative bodies has disappeared. Why is that so?

1.      New Deal—with the implementation of the New Deal in response to the economic situation caused by the Great Depression, the economic hegemony that the very rich had exercised over the economy was called into question. Although the New Deal was not a programmatic solution (it was, in fact, trial and error), it fostered the belief that government could—and should—be used to regulate the perceived excesses of capitalism. The success that this program experienced led to the Democratic Party controlling both houses of Congress into the 1980s—and also meant that the New Deal legislative program was largely unchallenged until it began to falter in the late 1960s.

2.      Rise of Think Tanks and Foundations—because implementing a legislative program was largely closed off, conservative turned to think tanks and foundations to propagate their ideas until they could regain control of the legislative process.

3.      Barry Goldwater—the emergence of an attractive political figure, Arizona politician Barry Goldwater, gave conservatives a foothold in the Republican Party. Even his landslide defeat after winning the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 did little to discourage conservative activists.

4.      Richard Nixon—While initially Nixon’s re-emergence seemed to spell defeat for conservatives, Watergate proved to be just the opening for conservatives to take over control of a demoralized party

5.      Ronald Reagan—Reagan’s victory in the 1980 election, and his partial implementation of his legislative agenda—coupled with the lack of a viable alternative offering by the Democratic Party—made the Republican Party more attractive for conservatives, and less so for those who were not conservative.

6.      Caucuses—smaller groups within a larger party who join together to agitate for the implementation legislation along a specific agenda.

F.      The Organization of Congress: Committees—Committees are charged with doing much of the work of Congress; it is in committees where most legislation gets debated and shaped. Committees recommend legislation to the floors of Congress for voting—or, sometimes, refuse to allow a particular piece of legislation out of committee to be voted on (such legislation is then said to have “died in committee”)

1.      Standing committees—deal with the most important legislation, and can also directly recommend legislation to the floors of Congress (or not, as discussed above).

2.      Select committees—usually temporary committees formed to undertake specific hearings, or on specific matters for legislation

3.      Conference committee—membership is made up from both the House and the Senate, and the committee is charged with reconciling legislation that was passed by both bodies, but with parts of the bills not in total agreement.

G.    The Organization of Congress: Staff and Specialized Offices

1.      Staff—each member of Congress is assigned (or, given a budget to hire) personnel to staff his office. A member of Congress is not able to keep up with all the legislation that comes up for voting, or with the expectations of those in their district or state who express their concerns over some piece of legislation (or some other problem), and rely upon their staff to address these problems

2.      Staff Agencies—Often times, members of Congress need specialized advice that their own staff cannot provide. It is the job of the staff of the Congressional Research Service, the General Accounting Office, and the Congressional Budget Office to provide this information in a non-partisan manner

H.    How a Bill Become Law

I.       How Members of Congress Vote

1.      Representational View

2.      Organizational View

3.      Attitudinal View

J.       A Polarized Congress in an Unpolarized Nation(?)

Campaigns and Elections

I.                   Campaigns

A.    Political Participation

1.      Forms of Participation

a.       Political activists—individuals actively interested in politics, campaigns, and political parties enough to donate money and/or time to helping candidates and parties run election campaigns.

b.      Voting—most people participate in elections by voting for specific candidates

c.       Non-participants—participation in elections is largely defined by income levels—the more money one has, the more likely one is to donate a portion of that money to specific campaigns or to political parties (see Koch Brothers, etc.).

2.      Why People Participate—Americans participate largely from a sense of civic duty; most Americans, when asked, feel that they should vote, even when they do not. The difficulty Americans face in actually casting a vote (even before the passage of the numerous “anti-fraud” voter identification laws) is unprecedented in democratic governments.

3.      Who Participates?—participation in elections is largely determined by education levels (the more education one has, the more likely it is that one will vote in a given election); income level is also a factor, although less of a factor than education level.

B.     Historical Voting Patterns—It is ironic that among the largest democratic countries the United States is near the bottom in participation among those eligible, because the United States was among the first to create universal (white) suffrage.

1.      The Rise of the American Electorate—at the time the Constitution was ratified, voting was restricted to taxpayers or property owners. By the time of the election of Andrew Jackson, voting rights had been extended to all white men. Voting rights were extended to black men with the passage of the 15^th Amendment in 1870, although those rights were scaled back with the passage of literacy tests, poll taxes, and the “grandfather clause” that many Southern states resorted to restrict these rights for African Americans; for many, these rights were not regained until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Woman, of course, did not get the right to vote in national elections until passage of the 19^th Amendment in 1920, and 18-year-olds were given the right to vote with the passage of the 26^th Amendment.

2.      Voting Turnout—despite the legal safeguards extended to voters during the 20^th century, the percentage of voting-age participation has actually decreased from its 19^th century highs. Scholars argue about its causes—or if it even really exists, given the likely levels of election fraud in the 19^th century—but at least part of the explanation should include the realization that American elections are largely non-ideological, with both major political parties campaigning from the center, where they can appeal to the greatest share of the electorate.

3.      Explaining—and Improving—Turnout—in other democracies around the world, when you become old enough to vote, you are automatically registered to vote. In the United States, the burden of registering to vote falls completely on the voter, who must find out the whole process themselves.

4.      Modern-Day Vote “Fraud”—for nearly as long as there have been elections, there have been attempts to steal elections. While allegations of fraud undermine public confidence in electoral outcomes, how real is this threat?

a.       Ballot-stuffing—much more prevalent during the 19^th century, but practically non-existent today—although the danger exists that computer hackers could change results in many electronic systems in use among local election commissions today.

b.      “Ghost” or “Cemetery” Voting—while urban machines may have been able to round up enough people to take around to various polling stations to swing an election in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, that threat is non-existent today.

c.       Voter “Caging” and the Suppression—many of the fears of non-existent voter fraud are used to attempt to suppress votes from minorities and poor people through voter “caging” operations, where votes individuals cast are challenged by allegations of ineligibility or fraud.

C.     Political Campaigns—are largely run by personal followers of a candidate (or a team s/he hires), rather than by a political party, which had been the case in the past. The turn to the primary election has probably been the greatest contributor to this trend.

1.      Strategy—because state parties want to increase their influence in which candidate becomes the candidate of their party, the dates for primary elections (and caucuses, for that matter), are mostly front-loaded at the beginning of an elections year. This means that candidates have to begin campaigning earlier and earlier (witness the ongoing Republican Party primary campaign, which began in earnest more than a year before the party holds its next convention). Candidates (or at least, their campaign staff) must also be aware of the intricacies of each of the state primaries and caucuses (whether they are winner-take-all, or proportional—failure to realize this cost Hilary Clinton the victory in the 2008 Democratic primaries).

2.      Using Television—There are two ways of using television: by running paid advertisements; or by getting on nightly newscasts. To get on newscasts, candidates must plan “events” that will attract cameras, and be early enough in the day to make the evening news.

a.       Social media—while some candidates are more adept at using social media than others, nearly every candidate today has a “presence” on a variety of social media sites, especially Facebook and Twitter.

D.    The Effects of Campaigns—No one knows for sure how effective campaigns are in convincing voters to back a specific candidate (analysis of campaigns always comes after the fact, and consists mostly of suppositions of what strategies actually worked, without any hard data to actually back those suppositions up).

1.      Party loyalty—although throughout the 20^th century there were more people who claimed to be Democrats than Republicans, Republicans tend to display greater party loyalty, and are less prone to “crossover” and vote for the candidate of another party (there are very few “Obama Republicans,” for instance, than there were “Reagan Democrats”).

2.      “It’s the Economy, Stupid”—James Carvelle’s famous edict is perhaps one of the most profound insights into the American electorate. If the economy is doing well, the American people tend to be content with how things are being run; if the economy is not doing well, there tends to be demands for change.

3.      Single-issue political groups—while scholars are still unsure of the impact that single-issue groups have during a general campaign, they do have a significant impact during primary campaigns, where their number of committed voters and money have a much greater effect.

E.     How to Win the Election—the victor in most elections usually only has to convince 20 percent of the voters, because 80 percent have already made up their minds based on party affiliation. Running against an incumbent during a bad economy also increases one’s chances immensely—or one who has been accused of some kind of personal indiscretion. Voters may also be divided between those who are retrospective voters (who look to what previous candidates of a particular party have done) and those who are prospective voters (who wonder what effect the proposed policies of a particular candidate will have in the future).

F.      Election Outcomes-the only outcome that matters, of course, is who wins, but scholars often look for patterns that they think signal “party realignments.”

1.      Party Realignments—so-called “critical elections” (the defeat of the Federalists by the Jeffersonians in 1800, the rise of Jacksonian Democrats in 1828, the collapse of the Whig party between 1856 and 1860, the 1896 triumph over William Jennings Bryan, the 1932 New Deal coalition, the rise of Ronald Reagan)—is this a pattern, or happenstance?

2.      Party Decline—with more voters having a less-defined identification with a particular political party, more voters “split” their ballots—that is, vote for candidates from both major parties

3.      Winning coalition—The waning strength of parties to deliver voters ironically makes them more reliant upon those voting blocs that traditionally vote for party candidates.

G.    Modern Technology and Political Campaigns

1.      Television, Radio, and Newspapers—the traditional sources of information have lost much of their appeal to today’s voters. Radio, in particular, broadcasts largely to a self-selected audience (are there any left-wing radio shows?), so any efforts there are merely preaching to the choir. Most television today can largely be viewed without bothering to watch commercials, and is also largely narrowcast to a select audience.

2.      Direct mail and the Internet—both are still useful for fundraising, although direct mail, the method used to reinvigorate the political right, has been superseded by use of the internet (witness Obama’s fundraising this past month).

H.    Elections and Money—“Money is the mother’s milk of politics.”

1.      The Impact of Money—Generally, the candidate who has the most money to spend is generally the most successful.

2.      Where Does the Money Come From?

a.       Individuals/Corporations—now that the Supreme Court has decided that corporations are people, too …

b.      Political Actions Committees (PACs)—special interest groups like labor unions and business groups raise money to contribute to candidates, as well

c.       “Soft Money” and 527s—attempts to regulate political contributions (largely thrown out by the recent Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court) created a loophole, whereby restrictions on contributions to candidates were gotten around by contributing money to “independent” groups who advocated on behalf of a party or candidate, but did not “coordinate” those efforts with the party or individual.

I.       The Effects of Elections on Policy—although we cynically think that elections have no effect on our day-to-day lives, they do sometimes effect great changes (ending slavery, the New Deal, etc.). Our election system today rewards those who can portray themselves as “outsiders”—even if they have been intimately connected with the political system all their lives—and are willing to devote three-to-four (or six-to-eight, in some cases) years of their lives to campaigning for office.