Reviews legislative proposals and makes recommendations to senators of the majority party. Steering Committee. Minority Leader. Chairman of the Conference. Committee on Committees.
Assists the leader, rounds up votes, heads large group of deputy and assistant whips. Steering and Policy Committee. Assists the leader, rounds up votes, heads large forum of deputy and assistant whips. The following is a brief summary: To levy and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises. To borrow money. To regulate commerce with foreign nations, among the states, and with Indian tribes.
To establish rules for naturalization that is, becoming a citizen and bankruptcy. To coin money, set its value, and punish counterfeiting.
To fix the standard of weights and measures. To establish a post office and post roads. To issue patents and copyrights to inventors and authors. To create courts inferior to that is, below the Supreme Court. To define and punish piracies, felonies on the high seas, and crimes against the law of nations. To declare war. That is, the practice of being a representative and the act of representing is less straightforward than the institutions of political representation, as the institutional norms are clearly defined.
Yet the roles and responsibilities of the legislators outside the institutions are not so clearly defined, as they are contested and ultimately judged by a more unpredictable populace. There is much literature on the idea of representative democracy and how to institutionalise and practise this idea, while the roles of political actors are overlooked or subordinated. Rather it is the roles of citizens and their engagement with representative democracy that excites interest and invites further investigation.
Of the comparatively smaller number of scholars who have focused on the role of representatives, eighteenth-century political philosopher Edmund Burke, and more recently, American political theorist Professor Hanna Pitkin, are two of the most cited theorists in this area. Burke writes:. Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole—where not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.
You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament. While this view is still popular and useful for analysing the behaviour of contemporary politicians, his work has been criticised for its inconsistencies. Proceeding cautiously, Pitkin devotes a chapter to Burke in her landmark work The Concept of Representation Representatives have also been variously conceived as agents, trustees, deputies and delegates.
A number of positions have at one time or another been defended, between the two poles of mandate and independence. A highly restrictive mandate theorist might maintain that true representation occurs only when the representative acts on explicit instructions from his constituents, that any exercise of discretion is a deviation from this ideal. A more moderate position might be that he may exercise some discretion, but must consult his constituents before doing anything new or controversial, and then do as they wish or resign his [post].
A still less extreme position might be that the representative may act as he thinks his constituents would want, unless or until he receives instructions from them, and then he must obey.
Very close to the independence position would be the argument that the representative must do as he thinks best, except insofar as he is bound by campaign promises or an election platform.
At the other extreme is the idea of complete independence, that constituents have no right even to exact campaign promises; once a man is elected he must be completely free to use his own judgment. Further complicating this debate is the issue of the national interest, political parties and the challenges of representing a diverse constituency. Mandate theorists favour local interests on the basis that the representative is elected locally, and argue that the sum of local interests equals the national interest.
Yet the national parliament is preoccupied with national politics; as previously mentioned, parliamentarians divide along national party lines rather than regional or local lines. The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, despite being local members, speak as national representatives on national issues. Parties are variously portrayed as links between local and national interests, antithetical to the national interest, or binding the member to a party program, which a constituency endorses.
Most parliamentarians have to be very sensitive to party concerns and cultivate relationships with party colleagues, especially party leaders and other powerful figures.
Dovi argues that:. A good democratic representative is not likely to be approved by, or even appreciated by, every one of her constituents, let alone by all citizens. Thus my claim is not that a good democratic representative will be valued by every citizen or even a majority of citizens ; rather, my claim is that a good democratic representative will be the unbridled advocate of her own constituents.
Yet it is difficult to reconcile this normative value with the electoral reality. Presumably if the majority of citizens do not value good democratic representation, it will result in a negative electoral evaluation. The extent to which a representative is bound by the wishes of their constituency is the subject of a central debate within the literature and there are many compromise positions, with some theorists even maintaining that both extremes are true without offering any practical reconciliation of the inherent tensions.
Defining a static and universally applicable representative role is problematic. According to Pitkin, Burke regarded political representation as the representation of an abstract interest, which is objective, impersonal and unattached from reality. Representing as a substantive activity may often have seemed remote from the realities of political life.
A political representative—at least the typical member of an elected legislature—has a constituency rather than a single principal; and that raises problems about whether such as unorganized group can even have an interest for him to pursue, let alone a will to which he could be responsive, or an opinion before which he could attempt to justify what he has done.
These problems are further heightened when we consider what political science teaches about the members of such a constituency, at least in a modern mass democracy—their apathy, their ignorance, their malleability. Furthermore, the representative who is an elected legislator does not represent his constituents on just any business, and by himself in isolation.
He works with other representatives in an institutionalized context at a specific task—the governing of a nation or a state. Are members and senators representing the same of different things? For instance before legislation comes before the House, more often than not it will be considered before a committee but in the Senate this step is easily bypassed. The House usually also limits its debate times to one hour but in the Senate discussion is unlimited.
Senators may speak on issues other than the bill under consideration during their speeches, and any amendment can be introduced. Party leaders and committees function differently in the House and Senate. The Speaker, currently Nancy Pelosi, is in charge of which bills are debated and when. She also influences the House Rules Committee in deciding which legislation will be considered.
The Senate does not have a position with similar control to the House Speaker. In the Senate, the majority and minority leaders generally work together in consultation with all members to determine the schedule. Both chambers are reliant upon the other when it comes to passing laws, they are intertwined in this way. If the bill gets approval by committee it then gets reported to the floor of the House or Senate and the relevant chamber gets to decide when to schedule the session for consideration, if at all.
Then if it passes the first consideration, it needs to also pass in whichever happens to be the second chamber in order to be signed into law by the president. So if a bill is first considered in the House, it later goes to the Senate to be passed and vice versa. Power is currently split in Congress with Republicans controlling the Senate for now though this could change pending Georgia Senate runoff elections in January and the Democrats who took control of the House in the midterms. Given the above system, this makes it extremely difficult to pass laws.
Thank you, Georgia! Now on to the next fight, when we take back the Senate on Jan 5. The Senate has unique powers compared to the House and for this reason is often considered more prestigious. The Senate also has the power to approve treaties with foreign countries. In general, the House tends to be more concerned with taxes and spending , awarding it a lot of influence when it comes to the national purse.
Currently Democrats hold power in the lower chamber and it looks likely to stay that way in
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