The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Senators and representatives are chosen through direct election, though vacancies in the Senate may be filled by a governor's appointment. Congress has 535 voting members: 100 senators and 435 representatives. The U.S. vice president has a vote in the Senate only when senators are evenly divided. The House of Representatives has six non-voting members.
An omnibus spending bill is a type of bill in the United States that packages many of the smaller ordinary appropriations bills into one larger single bill that can be passed with only one vote in each house of Congress. There are twelve different ordinary appropriations bills that need to be passed each year to fund the federal government and avoid a government shutdown. An omnibus spending bill combines two or more of those bills into a single bill.
Political polarization is the divergence of political attitudes away from the center, towards ideological extremes.
The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress, which along with the United States House of Representatives—the lower chamber—comprises the legislative branch of the federal government of the United States. Like its counterpart, the Senate was established by the United States Constitution and convened for its first meeting on March 4, 1789 at Federal Hall in New York City. The history of the institution begins prior to that date, at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, in James Madison's Virginia Plan, which proposed a bicameral national legislature, and in the controversial Connecticut Compromise, a 5–4 vote that gave small-population states disproportionate power in the Senate.
An independent voter, often also called an unaffiliated voter or non-affiliated voter in the United States, is a voter who does not align themselves with a political party. An independent is variously defined as a voter who votes for candidates on issues rather than on the basis of a political ideology or partisanship; a voter who does not have long-standing loyalty to, or identification with, a political party; a voter who does not usually vote for the same political party from election to election; or a voter who self-describes as an independent.
Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation, by Frances E. Lee and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, is a 1999 book that analyzes the behavior of US senators based on the size of the states that they represent.
The conservative coalition, founded in 1937, was an unofficial alliance of members of the United States Congress which brought together the conservative wings of the Republican and Democratic parties to oppose President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. In addition to Roosevelt, the conservative coalition dominated Congress for four presidencies, blocking legislation proposed by Roosevelt and his successors. By 1937, the conservatives were the largest faction in the Republican Party which had opposed the New Deal in some form since 1933. Despite Roosevelt being a Democrat himself, his party did not universally support the New Deal agenda in Congress. Democrats who opposed Roosevelt's policies tended to hold conservative views, and allied with conservative Republicans. These Democrats were mostly located in the South. According to James T. Patterson: "By and large the congressional conservatives agreed in opposing the spread of federal power and bureaucracy, in denouncing deficit spending, in criticizing industrial labor unions, and in excoriating most welfare programs. They sought to 'conserve' an America which they believed to have existed before 1933."
David R. Mayhew is a political scientist and Sterling Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Yale University. He is widely considered one of the leading scholars on the United States Congress, and the author of nine influential books on American politics, including Congress: The Electoral Connection. In 2017, University of California, Berkeley professor Eric Schickler chronicled Mayhew's lifetime of contributions to the study of Congress in a journal article published in The Forum. Mayhew has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1968, and his students include several leading contemporary scholars of American politics, including the University of California, San Diego professor Gary Jacobson, Yale professor Jacob Hacker, and Northwestern Pritzker School of Law professor Steven Calabresi, as well as many famous figures such as Detroit Lions Pro Bowl quarterback Greg Landry and CNN personality Chris Cuomo. He has also taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College, Oxford University, and Harvard University.
Party identification refers to the political party with which an individual identifies. Party identification is affiliation with a political party. Party identification is typically determined by the political party that an individual most commonly supports.
In the United States, term limits restrict the number of terms of office an officeholder may serve. At the federal level, the president of the United States can serve a maximum of two four-year terms, limited by the 22nd Amendment to the United States Constitution. Some State government offices are also term-limited, including executive, legislative, and judicial offices.
C. Lawrence (Larry) Evans is the Newton Family Professor of Government, specializing in the area of American national institutions at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.
The United States House of Representatives is the lower chamber of the United States Congress, with the Senate being the upper chamber. Together, they comprise the national bicameral legislature of the United States. The House is charged with the passage of federal legislation, known as bills; those that are also passed by the Senate are sent to the president for signature or veto. The House's exclusive powers include initiating all revenue bills, impeaching federal officers, and electing the president if no candidate receives a majority of votes in the Electoral College.
The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress. The United States Senate, along with the lower chamber of Congress, the United States House of Representatives, comprise the federal bicameral legislature of the United States. The Senate and House maintain authority under Article One of the U.S. Constitution to pass or defeat federal legislation. The U.S. Senate has exclusive power to confirm U.S. presidential appointments, ratify treaties, exercise advice and consent powers, try cases of impeachment brought by the House, all of which provide a check and balance on the powers of the executive and judicial branches of government.
The history of the United States Congress refers to the chronological record of the United States Congress including legislative sessions from 1789 to the present day. It also includes a brief history of the Continental Congress from 1774 through 1781 and the Congress of the Confederation from 1781 to 1789.
NOMINATE is a multidimensional scaling application developed by US political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal in the early 1980s to analyze preferential and choice data, such as legislative roll-call voting behavior. In its most well-known application, members of the US Congress are placed on a two-dimensional map, with politicians who are ideologically similar being close together. One of these two dimensions corresponds to the familiar left–right political spectrum.
Nolan Matthew McCarty is an American political scientist specializing in U.S. politics, democratic political institutions, and political methodology. He has made notable contributions to the study of partisan polarization, the politics of economic inequality, theories of policy-making, and the statistical analysis of legislative voting.
The UCLA School of Political Parties is a school of thought that contends that political parties are created by the policy demands of groups in society. It is so named because many of its proponents studied at or are faculty members in UCLA's political science department. The school's views contrast with the view that policy outcomes are secondary or subordinate to the goal of winning office. Their view can be seen in the book The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform by Martin Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller, and in an article in Perspectives by Kathleen Bawn, Cohen, Karol, Seth Masket, Noel and Zaller.
Sarah A. Binder is an American political scientist, author, senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, and professor of political science at George Washington University's Columbian College of Arts and Science.
Kristi Andersen is an American political scientist. She is a professor emerita at Syracuse University, and a Senior Research Associate at the Campbell Public Affairs Institute in the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She studies party system realignment in the United States, women and politics in American political history, and the incorporation of immigrants into American politics. Andersen also serves as an elected member of the Town Board in Cazenovia, New York.
Political polarization is a prominent component of politics in the United States. Scholars distinguish between ideological polarization and affective polarization, both of which are apparent in the United States. In the last few decades, the U.S. has experienced a greater surge in ideological polarization and affective polarization than comparable democracies.
