United States Congress

• 1. Introduction

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  The United States Congress first met in 1789, replacing a weaker body that could not collect taxes, regulate trade, or enforce its own laws. What replaced it was something genuinely new: a legislature split into two chambers, each with its own character, its own rhythms, and its own jealously guarded powers. At its core, Congress was designed around a problem the founders could not stop arguing about. How do you give a representative body real authority without letting it be captured by any single faction, any one state, any dominant region? The answer they devised was a kind of organized tension, and that tension has never fully resolved. It is a body that scholar Lee H. Hamilton called the heart and soul of American democracy, even as one writer noted that legislators remain ghosts in America's historical imagination. So what does Congress actually do, how did it come to work the way it does, and why does a body that was always meant to be the most powerful branch of the federal government so often seem like the least respected one?

• 2. Born from Failure

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  The Congress of the Confederation, created by the Articles of Confederation in 1781, was a single chamber where each state held an equal vote and a veto over most decisions. It had executive authority but not legislative authority. The federal courts could only hear admiralty cases. Nobody had the power to collect taxes or regulate commerce, and no one could enforce a law that a state decided to ignore. That powerlessness drove delegates to Philadelphia in 1787 for what became the Constitutional Convention.

  The deepest fight there was not about democracy in the abstract. It was about math. Larger states wanted representation tied to population. Smaller states wanted every state to stand equal regardless of size. When the Constitution was ratified in 1787, the ratio of the populations of the largest states to the smallest was roughly twelve to one, and both sides knew exactly what was at stake. The Connecticut Compromise broke the deadlock by splitting the difference: representatives would be chosen by population in the lower chamber, and every state, large or small, would send exactly two senators to the upper one.

  The two-chamber structure had already functioned well in state governments, so it was familiar ground. The new design also embedded something older and more philosophical: the separation of powers, with each branch given a separate sphere and the tools to check the others. Political scientist Julian E. Zelizer later mapped four main congressional eras growing from this foundation: a formative era in the 1780s-1820s, a partisan era running through the 1830s-1900s, a committee era in the 1910s-1960s, and the contemporary era from 1970 forward.

• 3. Power on Paper and in Practice

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  Article One of the Constitution opens with a direct claim: all legislative powers granted by the document belong to Congress. Section Eight then lists those powers in detail, and the list is long. Congress can lay and collect taxes, borrow money on the credit of the United States, regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the states, coin money, establish post offices and post roads, issue patents and copyrights, and declare war. That last power has been one of the most contested in American history.

  Historically presidents asked for formal war declarations, and Congress provided them for the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. But the pattern shifted. In the early days after the North Korean invasion of 1950, President Truman described the American military response as a police action. By 1970, according to Time magazine, U.S. presidents had ordered troops into position or action without a formal congressional declaration a total of 149 times. In 1993, writer Michael Kinsley described Congress's war power as the most flagrantly disregarded provision in the Constitution.

  Beyond war, Congress holds the power of the purse, the authority to appropriate all federal funds. The Constitution also grants Congress the exclusive power to remove officials through impeachment. The House impeaches by a simple majority; the Senate convicts by a two-thirds vote. In the full history of the United States, the House has impeached sixteen officials, of whom seven were convicted. Only three presidents have ever been impeached: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1999, and Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021. The trials of all three, including the 2019 Trump trial, ended in acquittal. In Johnson's case, the Senate fell exactly one vote short of the two-thirds required for conviction. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 before the full House could vote, after impeachment proceedings in the House Judiciary Committee made his removal appear certain.

• 4. How a Bill Becomes Law

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  Anyone can write a bill. Only members of Congress can introduce one. In the House, a member introduces a bill by placing it in the hopper on the Clerk's desk, where it is assigned a number and referred to a committee. Drafting statutes requires, in the words of one description, great skill, knowledge, and experience, and the process sometimes takes a year or more.

  Committees are where most of the real work happens, and they have been called independent fiefdoms. About two hundred committees and subcommittees divide the legislative workload. The House has twenty standing committees; the Senate has sixteen. Each committee is led by a chair from the majority party and a ranking member from the minority. Witnesses and experts can testify for or against a bill, then the committee may hold a mark-up session to debate, amend, or revise it. If the committee votes to report the bill, it moves to the full chamber floor. If it is tabled, it dies.

  When a bill reaches the floor of either house, debate proceeds under rules governing time limits and the possibility of further amendments. Both chambers must pass identical versions of the same bill before it can go to the president. If the versions differ, a conference committee of senators and representatives tries to reconcile them. Once both chambers agree, the bill goes to the president, who can sign it into law, veto it, or do nothing. If the president does nothing and Congress remains in session, the bill becomes law automatically after ten days, not counting Sundays. If Congress is adjourned during that window, the president can kill the bill simply by ignoring it, a move known as a pocket veto, which the adjourned Congress has no opportunity to override.

• 5. The Weight of Money

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  In 1971, the cost of running for a House seat in Utah was $70,000. Today a House race costs more than a million dollars. A Senate race typically costs six million or more. The largest expense in both cases is television advertising.

  Campaign finance law has tried repeatedly to contain those costs. The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 was among the first major attempts. But one account noted that post-Watergate amendments to that law, enacted in 1974, ended up legitimizing political action committees rather than limiting their influence, because the amendments enabled individuals to band together in support of candidates. Between 1974 and 1984, the number of PACs grew from 608 to 3,803. Donations from PACs leaped from $12.5 million to $120 million in the same period. By 2009, there were 4,600 business, labor, and special-interest PACs, including ones for lawyers, electricians, and real estate brokers. From 2007 to 2008, 175 members of Congress received half or more of their campaign cash from PACs.

  Lobbyists are the other financial current running through the Capitol. In 2007, there were approximately 17,000 federal lobbyists working in Washington, D.C. Representative Jim Cooper of Tennessee told Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig that a central problem was members focusing on their future careers as lobbyists after leaving office, treating Congress as what Cooper called a Farm League for K Street. A 2011 study concluded that portfolios held by members of Congress outperformed both the market and hedge funds, which the authors put forward as evidence of insider trading.

• 6. Women and the Path to Congress

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  Social and structural barriers blocked women from congressional seats for most of the institution's history. In the early 20th century, women could not vote, and their assigned domestic roles foreclosed any realistic path to public office. The two-party system and the absence of term limits protected incumbent white men, and the most common route to Congress for white women was what was called the widow's succession: temporarily taking over a seat vacated by the death of a husband.

  The second-wave feminism movement began shifting the terrain. Donors and political action committees, including EMILY's List, began recruiting, training, and funding women candidates starting in the 1970s. Specific political moments accelerated that momentum further: the confirmation of Clarence Thomas created the conditions for what became known as the Year of the Woman, and the 2016 presidential election generated momentum that led to the election of the members known as The Squad.

  Women of color faced additional layers of difficulty. Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, and structural racism made it virtually impossible for women of color to reach Congress before 1965. The passage of the Voting Rights Act that year, alongside the elimination of race-based immigration laws in the 1960s, opened possibilities for Black, Asian American, Latina, and other non-white women candidates. Senate races proved especially hard: they require victories across entire statewide electorates. Carol Moseley Braun became the first woman of color elected to the Senate in 1993. The second, Mazie Hirono, won in 2013. In 2021, Kamala Harris became the first female President of the Senate, a role that came with her position as the first female Vice President of the United States.

• 7. Public Standing and Its Limits

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  Public opinion polls tracking Congressional approval have hovered around 25% for much of the last few decades, with significant drops in moments of visible dysfunction. In October 2013, after Congress proved unable to reach a budget compromise and parts of the government shut down for several weeks, approval fell to 5%. A poll at that moment found that 60% of the public said they would fire every member of Congress, including their own representative. Since 2006, Congress dropped ten points in the Gallup confidence poll, with only nine percent saying they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in their legislators.

  Scholars who study Congress tend to read this gap between reputation and reality as a structural artifact. Unlike the presidency, which centers on a single, recognizable figure, Congress is designed to be plural, slow, and divided. Its 535 voting members represent constituencies with fundamentally different interests. Political scientist Julian Zeliger observed that the size, messiness, virtues, and vices that make Congress so interesting also create enormous barriers to understanding it. One writer captured the dynamic plainly: Congress is easy to dislike and often difficult to defend.

  Reelection rates persist at around 90% despite that low approval, which critics point to as evidence that incumbents have successfully insulated themselves from accountability. Gerrymandering lets the party in power draw district boundaries after each ten-year census to favor its own candidates. Franking privileges give incumbents free mailing rights. Donors fund incumbents over challengers because incumbents are seen as more likely to win. As of January 2014, for the first time, more than half of the members of Congress were millionaires. Princeton scholar Stephen Macedo is among the academics who have proposed remedies to fix gerrymandering, while the debate over what structural reforms might restore public trust continues well past the institution's first two centuries.