INTRODUCTION
Maybe you aren’t 100 percent sure what the secretary of defense does all day. Or you’re feeling a bit iffy as to what “free speech” actually means. Perhaps you’ve been pretending you know the definition of federalism.
What luck, then, that you’ve found yourself in possession of the basics of this democratic republic all in one place. This is your user’s guide to American democracy, giving you the fundamentals on everything from the presidency to our election system to our basic civil rights. We parse the great hulking mass of our government into essential knowledge.
In order to enjoy and preserve this democracy, we have to know how it works. Understanding your rights as an American citizen can protect your job, your health, and your freedom. An awareness of the way things work around here is valuable armor. But it’s a lot to remember, so we wrote it down in a book for you.
We do this for a living as the hosts of a public radio show and podcast, Civics 101. We guide people through the maze of American democracy—from the Bill of Rights to executive privilege to Congressional investigations. Our show is a primer that leaves listeners better prepared to be engaged, aware citizens. Civics 101 was started in 2016 as a response to a flood of questions coming into the station, including, “Can he/she/they really do that?” “What does the secretary of state do all day?” “What is the Defense Department?” and “How is the House different from the Senate?” It was a wonderful opportunity for us to admit we barely knew the answers ourselves, and to call up the experts who do. We’ve relied on the information we’ve gleaned from them to write this primer. The information in these pages was gathered from our country’s most primary sources, the foundational documents, and what we found to be the most helpful of the nearly 250 years of scholarship and debate that have swirled around this democratic experiment since it first launched.
Within this book you’ll find what we have learned over years of “wait, what?” and “so that’s how it works,” and “can you explain that to us one more time?” We’ve played democracy’s interpreter so you don’t have to. As far as your family is concerned, you’ve always understood the finer points of McCulloch v. Maryland.
1
THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH
At the outset, it seems like the House of Representatives and the Senate do pretty much the same thing.
Senators and representatives drive, walk, or take the secret tiny electric underground train to their respective chambers. There, they propose legislation, talk about it, and vote on it. But while they share many powers, these two houses are not both alike in dignity. Or perceived clout, at least. The length of terms, number of members, unique powers, and methods of legislation make the House and Senate as different as chalk and cheese. But before we do a side-by-side comparison, let’s get some terminology out of the way.
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT CONGRESS
When we speak of Congress, we’re talking about both the House of Representatives and the Senate. They are that mighty first branch, the legislative, whose powers are established in Article I of the Constitution.
CONSTITUTION 101: Our constitution consists of seven articles written on four parchment pages. Article I, which establishes the legislative branch, gets far and away the most ink of them all, coming in at just over two pages by itself. And words are power! The more you have, the more things you can do. The founders clearly intended that Congress, not the president, was to be the most powerful arm of our government. That said, they also didn’t want a complete legislative dictatorship, so they carefully explained what Congress could and could not do.
While they are both technically “houses,” when we say “the House” we mean the House of Representatives. Those in the House are addressed as congresswoman/-man/-person. And while senators do work in Congress, they’re addressed as “senator.”
WHY TWO HOUSES?
Why not just have one house and be done with it? Why not a nice, pat, unicameral legislature that passes bills for the president to sign? Well, that was how we did things under the Articles of Confederation,1 our much maligned first constitution. And to be fair, there are some successful one-house legislatures out there (lookin’ at you, Nebraska!), but the bicameral system was born as a solution to one of the fiercest debates at the Constitutional Convention …
THE GREAT COMPROMISE
When the fifty-five delegates from twelve colonies (Rhode Island was a no-show2) were hammering out our new system of government in 1787, there arose a seemingly insurmountable issue of representation. How many people from each state should be elected to Congress? Before the convention even started, James Madison had drafted the Virginia Plan (also called the “Randolph Plan” or the amusingly blunt “Big State Plan”), which said that representation in Congress should be based on “the number of free inhabitants.” Enslaved Americans would initially not be counted toward apportionment. A big whanging state like New York would therefore have many times the power of a state like Delaware. The smaller states were more likely to back William Paterson’s New Jersey Plan (only referred to as the “Little State Plan” when New Jersey wasn’t in the room), which gave each state one vote, regardless of its size. And thus we got to the Great Compromise, where one house, the House of Representatives, was proportionate to the population of free inhabitants in each state, with enslaved people counting as three-fifths of a person (Native Americans not counting at all), and the other chamber, the Senate, consisting of two people from each state.
CONSTITUTION 101: The three-fifths compromise, within Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, is one of the two places slavery is mentioned in the Constitution, the other being its abolition within the Thirteenth Amendment. One of the most contentious battles about representation in the House was whether to count enslaved people (who had no vote) as part of the population. If they were counted, that would dramatically increase that state’s presence in the legislature. James Wilson, a vocal opponent to slavery, proposed that enslaved people should count as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation. This compromise secured southern support for the Constitution, but gave slave-states inordinate legislative power.
So that’s how we got here.
REPRESENTATION AND TERM LIMITS: THE HOUSE
There are 435 members of the House of Representatives. Each one represents a chunk of a state, called a Congressional District.
GERRYMANDERING: Gerrymandering (a word that comes from combining former Vice President Elbridge Gerry with “salamander”) is drawing Congressional Districts to favor one party or the other. A nice little case history of this is the 2016 Congressional Election, when there was about a fifty-fifty split of popular votes for Republican and Democratic reps. But due to those maps, the Republican party gained forty more seats in the House.
That number, 435, was chosen as a cap by the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. The number of reps from any state, however, can change.
For example, California has fifty-three reps now, but it only had thirty in the 1950s.3 If one state loses a Rep due to a decreasing population, some growing state will snap it up.
As to term limits, they are two years. No representative is safe. Every two years, all 435 of them are up for reelection.
BUT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
That means the House can be a wild and crazy place. A place that is subject to the ever-changing whims of the American people.
Because the House is refreshed so frequently, its representatives can campaign and vote on hot-button, often controversial issues. From the Anti-Masonic Movement4 to the Tea Party to the Green New Deal, the House has a rich history of people elected to shake things up.
Likewise, because they each represent their smaller Congressional District and not the entire state, house reps are more familiar with their constituents.
The price that the House pays for its closeness to the people is its reputation as the “lower house,” because they each represent fewer people and hold less power. But they are every bit as important to our government as the lofty Senate.
REPRESENTATION AND TERM LIMITS: THE SENATE
No complicated mathematical formula needed! Two people from every state. One hundred total.
Term limits are a little trickier in the Senate. A senator is elected for a whopping six-year term, but these terms are staggered, so every two years about a third of them are up for election. Senators belong to Class I, II, or III. This isn’t a ranking of any kind, it just determines when they’re up for reelection. Class II is up for election in 2020, Class III in 2022, and so on. Two senators from the same state are never in the same class. This was designed to ensure there’s some living memory in the Senate, so that when the new kids come to town there’s a majority that’s been there for some time already.
CONSTITUTION 101: But it hasn’t always been this way! The original text of the Constitution said, “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof.” They were elected by the state legislators, not by the people! In the early 1900s there was a growing fear that senators were buying their seats from corrupt state legislatures. The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, changed those words “chosen by the Legislature thereof” to “elected by the people thereof.”
BUT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
Senators have a nice long stretch in office, and therefore don’t have to start campaigning ten minutes after their acceptance speech. Because they represent an entire state, there is less room for radicalism, and leaders in the Senate work hard to quell any members who try to buck the party line.
The staggered election of senators has an enormous impact on our government. The Classes were divvied up during our first Senate in 1789, and when new states were added to the union, their two Senate seats were assigned the next available Classes, by drawing lots if it was more than one state at a time.
And the ramifications of this? Let’s say the Senate is pretty evenly split between the parties; if the Class that’s up for election is mostly from very conservative states, you’re going to get a Republican Senate majority with relatively little effort.
And finally, because Democrats have more voters in big cities, the Senate tends to swing more conservative. New York City has millions of Democrats, but their state gets just two senators, same as the dozen less-populated, more-Republican-dominated states.
WHO GETS TO DO IT: THE HOUSE
It’s pretty lax, actually! The Constitution says any American who is twenty-five or over, lives in the state they’re trying to represent, and has been a U.S. citizen for at least seven years can run for office.
WHO GETS TO DO IT ACTUALLY
In 1786, the average age of a member of the House was forty-five years old. That number has risen steadily ever since, with the 115th Congress, from 2017 to 2019, being the oldest in history, averaging 57.8.
But while the trend is old, white, wealthy, and male, the 2018 election ushered in a significantly younger House. Incoming members of Congress in 2018 were on average forty-seven years old, a full decade younger. The 116th Congress is also the most diverse in U.S. history, although there is clearly still a long way to go: 106 women, fifty-five Black Americans, forty-five Latinx Americans, twenty Asian Americans, and four Native Americans.
Money is certainly important in a House campaign, but not as important as it is for the Senate. In competitive House races in 2018, the mean spending on campaigns was about 4 million dollars. Since you’re representing a portion of your state, name recognition in your district is the most important thing. This is gained through local television ads and radio spots, plastering roads with campaign signs, attending events, and, most of all, knocking on doors.
Finally, it helps to be a Christian. According to a poll from the Pew Research Center, 53 percent of the current House is Protestant, 32 percent Catholic, and 1.4 percent Mormon. There are only three Muslims and one Buddhist. Fourteen members of the House answered “Don’t Know” or “Refuse to Answer” on the poll.
WHO GETS TO DO IT: THE SENATE
The rules are a little more stringent for the Senate, but not overwhelmingly so. The Constitution states in Article I, Section 3, that a senator must be thirty years old, nine years a U.S. citizen, and an inhabitant of the state they are running in.
WHO GETS TO DO IT ACTUALLY
While the aforementioned traits of being white, wealthy, old, and male help you out in the House, they really help out if you’re running for the Senate. And this is in no small amount related to the staggering amount of money you need to raise to run a Senate campaign. The average is over $10 million. In the narrow 2018 race for a Senate seat from Texas, Ted Cruz spent $45 million and Beto O’Rourke spent $78 million.
So, very wealthy. And if you want to know how white, take a guess at how many Black people have served in the entire history of the Senate.
Yup, ten. That’s all. As of this writing, there have only been ten Black people in the U.S. Senate.
Race and religious faith break down along similar lines as they do in the House, just with a significantly smaller portion of non-white and non-Christian senators. Two interesting stats, however, are gender (a full 25 percent of the Senate is female) and occupation (50 percent—half!—of our senators previously served in the House of Representatives). Just like it helps to have been a senator to be a president, working in the House is a way to get your foot in the senatorial door.
SHARED POWERS
Both Houses have one power above all else: Make the darn laws that run our country.The process for that differs in each, but basically speaking, bills are proposed by senators or representatives: a small percentage get voted on in one chamber; and if they are passed, they cross over to the other chamber. If they pass there, too, they go to the president, who then signs them into law or vetoes them. A veto kills a bill, unless two-thirds of both the House and Senate vote to override it, in which case it becomes a law without the president’s signature.
Either House can initiate constitutional amendments. With a two-thirds majority in both Houses, they can together override a presidential veto. Every year the president submits a budget request to both Houses, and they each write and vote on their own budget resolutions. Either House can pass a resolution to declare war,5 which they’ve done eleven times. The last time was against Romania in 1942. Likewise, either House can establish and levy taxes for the support of an army. Congress establishes rules about immigration and naturalization. And finally, they can coin money (as in mint quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies), print dollar bills, and regulate interstate commerce.One important point about the powers of Congress: If the rules aren’t specifically outlined in the Constitution, they can be altered. Every two years, the new Congress writes its rules. They can create new committees, new protocols for bringing bills to the floor, and even new rules for the filibuster. Thus, the information on the following pages is by no way set in stone. One of the most interesting things about our government is that while the Constitution is ironclad and very difficult to amend, the way the three branches wield their power is malleable and has changed over the centuries.
UNIQUE POWERS: THE HOUSE
Initiate money bills.If you’re like most of us and enjoy the gentle clink of a fat leather satchel of coins hitting the bar at the tavern, you’ll enjoy the expression “the power of the purse.” While both Houses initiate bills, only the House of Representatives can initiate bills regarding federal spending.
CONSTITUTION 101: Article I, Section 7 says, “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” But there are ways around this. The Senate can take a proposed bill from the House, gut everything, and change it to be about raising money wherever they want. Sure, it was technically initiated in the House, but it has zero actual House content. Also, all bets are off if the president declares a National Emergency. Money can come from just about anywhere when that happens.
These bills can give money, like an appropriation bill to a government agency, or they can eliminate funding.6
Break a tie.Three times in history, none recently,7 there was a tie for electoral votes for president. The House is charged with breaking that tie. It takes 270 votes to win, and it seems improbable to have a 269/269 tie in an election, but a “tie” includes when no party gets to that magic number. In 1968, the pro-segregation Independent George Wallace got forty-eight electoral votes, which wasn’t enough to force a tie, but proved it could happen again with a strong third-party candidate.
Initiate impeachment.The tools of investigation! Any member of the House can initiate impeachment with a resolution and start the ball rolling. It goes to the House Rules Committee and then the House Committee on the Judiciary, who investigate grounds of impeachment and report back to the House for a vote. And unlike in the Senate, where it takes a two-thirds majority to convict, the House requires just a basic majority of votes to impeach.
If the house votes “yea,” then the individual has been impeached, which just means “accused.” It then goes to the Senate, where the trial takes place, and only then, if the Senate votes against them, will the individual be removed from office, and possibly prevented from holding federal office again. This is why even though impeachment proceedings have happened about sixty times, only twenty of those have made it through the House, and only a meager eight have made it through the Senate, resulting in the official being removed from office. And while we may think of it as being something reserved for presidents, all eight were federal judges.
Three presidents have been impeached in U.S. history: Andrew Johnson (for violating the Tenure of Office Act, replacing his secretary of war before his tenure was up), Bill Clinton (for lying under oath and obstruction of justice regarding a sexual relationship he had with Monica Lewinsky), and Donald Trump (for abuse of power and obstruction of justice regarding his soliciting of election assistance from Ukraine). Richard Nixon was going to face impeachment for obstruction of justice regarding the Watergate break-in, but resigned upon learning he lacked the votes in the Senate to prevent removal.
UNIQUE POWERS: THE SENATE
Confirm appointments.This power is not found in the weighty first Article of the Constitution, but in Article II, Section 2. And it’s often called the “advice and consent” power. The text reads that the president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.” So the president picks, and the Senate gives the thumbs-up.
And while Supreme Court Justice nominees and Cabinet nominees get the most attention, there are about two thousand political offices that require appointment.
The nomination goes to its relevant committee, which can opt to hold hearings and vote to move it right to the floor for debate or vote to not move it to the floor.
The Senate majority leader then decides if and when this nomination will be voted on by the entire Senate.8 After debate (more on that later), the question is asked, “Will the Senate advise and consent to this nomination?” And 99 percent of the time, that nominee is confirmed.9
Treaties.Like confirmations, the Constitution says the president makes treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate. Unlike confirmations, it requires a whole two-thirds of the Senate to concur. They don’t ratify the treaty, they approve or reject the president’s resolution, or approve it pending required changes. And also like confirmations, treaties are usually approved. There have been only twenty-one rejections out of the 1,500 or so treaties sent to the Senate.
One reason for this is that only noncontroversial treaties get sent to the Senate in the first place. This is because the United States has a unique caveat to treaties, which is that they don’t necessarily have to happen. A treaty is an agreement with one or more nations that enters international law. And while the formal process requires the Senate’s approval, presidents can issue “executive agreements” which do not. And “executive agreements” happen about ten times as often as treaties. More on these in our section on the executive branch.
Try impeachment cases.Impeachment doesn’t mean removal from office, it just means the official is formally charged. What the House started, the Senate must finish. With the exception of presidential impeachment, the Senate runs the trial by themselves. Members of the House of Representatives act as prosecutors, presenting evidence to the Senate, who also act as jury. If two-thirds of the Senate give a guilty verdict, the official is removed from office.
In the rare occurrence of a president being put on trial, the chief justice of the Supreme Court steps in and runs the proceedings. But they’re not in any way similar to a judge in a courtroom proceeding. They cannot rule on their own, they do not determine rules of evidence, and everything is at the whim of the Senate majority.
Elect the vice president in case of a tie.Just a quick historical side note: Until 1800, the vice president didn’t run with the president. The person who became vice president was the presidential candidate who got the second-most electoral votes. But the Twelfth Amendment changed all that, stating that the president and vice president were to be elected separately, and if there was a tie for VP, the Senate got to choose. And it happened exactly one time.
EXECUTIVE BRANCH 101: In 1836, our well-sideburned eighth president, Martin Van Buren, won the presidential election. But his running mate, Richard Mentor Johnson, did not get enough VP votes to secure the job; he needed 148 and got 147. The Twelfth Amendment stated that if one candidate did not get enough votes, the Senate must pick from the top two candidates. Which they did. Johnson became the ninth VP and went on to break fourteen ties in the Senate.
We doubt we will ever see this again, since the standard now is that they both run on a shared ticket. But again, a “tie” can come from when no candidate gets the majority of Electoral College votes, meaning a strong third party can bring this power back into play.
HOW THINGS ACTUALLY GO: THE HOUSE
Let’s start with one fact: Of all the bills and resolutions proposed in the House, about 3 to 5 percent become law. And that low percentage has been pretty standard ever since we got on this merry-go-round in 1789.
Of that small number, the vast majority are what are considered “noncontroversial bills.” Naming a post office. Creating a holiday. Authorizing states to issue an electronic duck stamp.
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH 101: HR 1206, the Permanent Electronic Duck Stamp Act of 2013. Sadly, it was not about regulations regarding waterfowl-themed postage, but issuing permits for duck hunting.
It’s not that the House is afraid to pass radical, swooping bills. It’s just that it’s not in their best interest to go forward with something if it’s clear that it won’t pass in the House, let alone the Senate. A bill only needs a simple majority vote to pass on the House floor, but it rarely gets there.
Once a bill is proposed, it goes to a committee or a subcommittee, where it is, most of the time, postponed, abandoned, or forgotten. The lucky few that survive are researched in committee, debated, marked up, amended, and are sent to a Rules Committee (another committee!) to determine how they will be considered on the House floor. There are 435 people ready to weigh in, so debate time is strictly limited, and both debate and proposed amendments to the bill must be germane—they must be relevant to the piece of legislation. You can’t go sneakin’ a Christmas goose into a bill on highway maintenance. But most of the time, there are no amendments at all, and so-called “debate time” is limited to as little as fifteen minutes. Once the rules are set, it’s ready to put on the House calendar for a vote.
And you’d think, after all of this, after that poor bill has suffered the death of a thousand cuts, it would be ready finally to be trotted out for a vote. But there’s one last snag. A bill can be on the calendar, but the Speaker of the House decides which ones come to the floor on any given day. The schedule is always tight, and that bill can be pushed to the back of an overfull dance card, where it is kept waiting in the wings in its finest suit, only to be thrown out when the two-year session ends.
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH 101: There is a way to get a bill to the floor in spite of the speaker of the House (or, more often, the head of a committee who is stalling the process), and it’s called a discharge petition. These are extremely rare, but they’ve happened a handful of times. If a bill has been introduced and assigned to a committee for at least thirty days, half (218) of the House can sign a literal petition. These signatures are public information. And once 218 signatures have been collected, that bill is taken out of committee and put on the floor for a vote.
Bills have an expiration date. Every two years, Congress starts anew with a clean slate. So regardless of how far along a bill was in the process, it’ll have to start again from the very beginning.
Let’s look at the House of the 115th Congress, from 2017 through 2018.
9,871 bills were proposed. 1,371 got a vote. 1,322 passed in the House. 322 also passed in the Senate. 302 were signed by the president into law, 3.4 percent.When representatives propose bills, they show their constituents that they are doing things. They are people of action and beliefs. And while that may be true, the process can grind even the most earnest ideals to dust.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At the end of this chapter we’ll tell you why.
HOW THINGS ACTUALLY GO: THE SENATE
If you walk away with one tidbit of how things differ in the House and the Senate, let it be this. The Senate was created for debate. That is, unless we’re talking about a noncontroversial bill, where a senator can move for “unanimous consent,” and if every single voting member agrees, the bill can be passed with no debate, amendments, bill-reading, anything. This happens an awful lot.
But if a more controversial bill makes it to the Senate floor, unlike in the House, where discussion on bills is strictly timed and must be relevant, there are no restrictions whatsoever on topic or time. There isn’t even a Rules Committee! When bills get to the floor for a vote, Senators can talk about them for as long as they wish. Or any other matter. And here we enter the most important, much maligned, ever-changing land of …
THE FILIBUSTER10
Hoooo, doctor, here we go. Turn on the steam bath and put in your arch supports.
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH 101: In 1957, Senator Strom Thurmond broke the record for filibustering when he spoke for twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes to block a Civil Rights Act. Prior to his walk to the dais, he took steam baths to remove as much fluid from his body as possible so he wouldn’t have to urinate. There was a bucket strategically placed in the cloakroom in case of an emergency.
Until 1917, any member of the Senate could hold the floor as long as he wanted to delay voting on a bill. This became a tool for the minority to stall legislation of the majority. But the Senate changed their rules in 1917, creating something called cloture, whereby debate could be ended immediately if two-thirds of the Senate agreed. They did this because other Senate business could not happen while a bill was being debated, so a filibuster would bring the chamber to a complete standstill. This rule, created to protect the minority from being steamrollered, took on new power in the late 1950s and early ’60s, when Southern Democrats who opposed Civil Rights legislation brought the Senate to a standstill with myriad filibusters. The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 came after the Senate overcame a filibuster that had stalled any other legislation in the Senate for over sixty days.
In the wake of these Civil Rights filibusters, the 1970 Senate put a “two-track” system in place, whereby another piece of legislation could be on the floor on the same day, with time split between the two. This weakened the power of the filibuster to halt the gears of the Senate, but it made filibustering much easier to do, since you only had to do it for half of the day. Likewise, the number of votes needed for cloture was lowered from two-thirds to three-fifths, meaning you only needed sixty votes to stop a filibuster.
One of the most recent changes to the filibuster is something referred to as the “nuclear option,” where the Senate can vote to change its rules in certain circumstances to circumvent this sixty-vote requirement. In 2013, the Democrat-majority Senate voted that the filibuster would no longer be allowed for executive appointments except for nominations to the Supreme Court. And in 2017, the Republican-majority Senate extended that provision to the Supreme Court. Both parties altered the Senate rules to help their side; the Democrats to prevent filibustering of every appointee by President Obama, and the GOP to speed through President Trump’s Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch.
BUT WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
It technically only takes a majority, fifty-one votes, to pass a bill in the Senate. But unless we’re dealing with a presidential appointment, it is taken as a given that someone will filibuster. It is simpler to do, and has become the norm for any bill that has political significance. We’ve reached a point where senators no longer need to stand up and read recipes for fried oysters and crawfish (which Huey P. Long did in 1935) to stop a bill from being voted on. All that needs to happen is that a member of the opposing party inform the Senate majority leader that there are forty-one senators opposed to this bill, and the mere threat of a filibuster is enough to prevent the vote.
So while the number to win in the Senate is fifty-one votes, nobody will consider pushing a bill to the floor unless they think they have sixty.
And, perhaps the most important thing of all, none of this matters if the Senate majority leader doesn’t want something to be voted on. Discharge petitions are even less successful than in the House. If the Senate majority leader doesn’t want something to be voted on, the bill is almost certainly dead.
TELL ME THE GOOD NEWS
If the preceding pages angered you at all, if you dislike that it seems more likely to win a $3 trifecta at the Kentucky Derby than to get a bill through both chambers, maybe we can provide some cold comfort.
The inefficiencies in the House and the Senate seem like a bug, but they’re actually the whole point. This system is set up to prevent any radical movement or ideology from taking over and changing everything overnight. It takes people voting on issues in election after election to get anything done, waiting up to six years to replace a senator that they disagree with.
If efficiency is what you’re after, the most streamlined style of government is despotism: a system where a single entity makes every decision, and nobody disagrees with anything and everything gets done with the snap of a finger. Our system may seem complicated and messy and slow, but that’s exactly how the framers wanted it.
And remember, when we’re talking about things like the filibuster, or getting a vote onto the floor of the House, or a majority leader keeping a motion from even being debated—these are things that can change with any Congress, and it’s up to us to hold our representatives accountable to alter the rules we don’t like. Ultimately, because they know we select them, it is in their best interest to listen to us. But they don’t feel this pressure unless we make our opinions heard.
So give them a call. Their number one job is to listen to you.
Copyright © 2020 by Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy.
