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Delve into the organization and function of Congress, meet your representatives, and learn about Senator Mikulski and Senator Cardin's legislative work.
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The Legislative Branch (Congress) President George W. Bush delivers his State of the Union address to the nation and a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2003.
What is the main function of Congress? That’s right! To make laws.
But first, what is the make-up and organization of Congress? “Bicameral” = 2 Houses/Chambers theHouse of Representatives with435 members, and the …
Senate with 100 members, 2 from each state. The total # of voting members in Congress is 535.
Know your representatives Since reapportionment and redistricting in 2010-2012 (more on those terms later), Middletown is now in District 8. The representative in Washington D.C. for your district is Chris van Hollen Jr. Click here for map of MD’s districts
Know your Senators Barbara Mikulski grew up in the Highlandtown neighborhood of East Baltimore. Mikulski learned the values of hard work, neighbor helping neighbor and heartfelt patriotism. She often saw her father open the family grocery store early so local steelworkers could buy lunch before the morning shift. Determined to make a difference in her community, Mikulski became a social worker in Baltimore, helping at-risk children and educating seniors about the Medicare program. Social work evolved into community activism when Mikulski successfully organized communities against a plan to build a 16-lane highway through Baltimore's Fells Point neighborhood. Senator Mikulski (D) greets Cal Ripken, Jr. during a rally to honor his Hall of Fame induction
Mikulski is a trailblazer. Her first election was a successful run for Baltimore City Council in 1971, where she served for five years. In 1976, she ran for Congress and won, representing Maryland's 3rd district for 10 years. In 1986, she ran for Senate and won, becoming the first Democratic woman Senator elected in her own right. She was re-elected with large majorities in 1992, 1998, 2004, and 2010. A leader in the Senate, Mikulski is the Dean of the Women – serving as a mentor to other women Senators when they first take office. As the dean, she builds coalitions – proving that the Senate women are not solo acts, but work together to get things done. Posing with Wes Unseld, Hall of Fame basketball player for the Washington Bullets.
and Benjamin Cardin, also a democrat. A 1967 graduate of the University of Maryland School of Law (1st in his class), he earned his B.A. degree in 1964 from the University of Pittsburgh (cum laude). As a Maryland legislator, Mr. Cardin served in the Maryland House of Delegates from 1967-1986.Senator Cardin has a long-standing interest in foreign affairs and human rights. In 2002, as a member of the House, he voted against giving the President the authority to go to war in Iraq. He has called on President Bush to present the American people with a plan to bring our troops home.
Senator Cardin talks with former U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Clarence Guess of Randallstown (center) and physical therapist Michele Likas (left) during his visit to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Baltimore. During his visit, Senator Cardin spoke about the need to increase funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs and modernize VA facilities to meet the serious medical needs of veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Senator Cardin investigates reports that political influence by the Bush administration had interfered with the ability of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Dept. to effectively investigate and prosecute civil rights violations.
Following a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senators Cardin and Barack Obama (D-IL) talk about their efforts to pass the Prevention of Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation in Federal Elections Act, S.453. The bill would criminalize voter intimidation.
Senator Cardin holds a press conference in Hagerstown to urge an override of the President's veto of the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) bill. Today, more than 100,000 Maryland children receive health care through CHIP. This bill, which has strong bipartisan support, would provide health care to an additional 42,000 uninsured Maryland children.
So there you have it. Your representatives in Congress. Two Senators and a representative from your district in the House. But “how long will they serve” you ask? Senators = 6 year terms House Representatives = 2 year terms …and they can serve for as long as they are re-elected. If someone is already in office, they are often referred to as the incumbent. It is often very hard to unseat an incumbent senator. There are currently 3 senators who have been serving for over 40 years.
Strom Thurmond of S. Carolina served for 49 years. He served as a democrat until 1964, and then as a Republican. He served as a senator from 1954 until 2003, the year he died. He conducted the longest filibuster ever by a lone senator, in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, at 24 hours and 18 minutes in length, nonstop. filibuster– an attempt to stop the passage of a bill by simply talking for long periods of time
In the 1960s, he continued to fight against civil rights legislation. He always insisted he had never been a racist, but was merely opposed to excessive federal authority. However, he infamously said that "all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement", while attributing the movement for integration to Communism. Starting in the 1970s, he moderated his position on race, but continued to defend his early segregationist campaigns on the basis of states' rights in the context of Southern society at the time, never fully renouncing his earlier viewpoints.
Six months after Thurmond's death in 2003, it was revealed that at age 22 he had fathered a daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, with his family's African-American maid Carrie Butler, then 16. Although Thurmond never publicly acknowledged his daughter, he paid for her college education and passed other money to her for some time. The Thurmond family acknowledged her. Essie Mae did not reveal her true father's identity until she was 78 years old, after Thurmond's death.
Ted Kennedy (younger brother of assassinated President John F. Kennedy) (D) of Massachusetts, served for 47 years.
Robert Byrd, a democratic senator from West Virginia, served for 51 years! That was a record.
John Dingell of the 12th district of Michigan served a record of 59 years as a Representative from 1955-2015. His wife succeeded him in office.
Not everyone can serve in Congress. There are certain qualifications that must be met. Senate • must be 30 years old • must be citizens for 9 years before they are elected • must be residents of the state they represent House • must be 25 yrs. old • must be a U.S. citizen for 7 years • must be residents of the state they represent If a senator dies or resigns before the end of his term, the governor will often appoint someone until the next election.
Who makes up the Senate? • There are currently 2 Asian Americans (2008) in the Senate, both democrats, and both from Hawaii. • There are currently 3 Hispanic Americans, 2 democrat, 1 republican, from the states of Colorado, New Jersey, and Florida, respectively. • The last Native American Senator was Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Northern Cheyenne), a republican from Colorado who served from 1993-2005. • There is currently 1 African American Senator, a democrat from Illinois. Can you name him? • There is currently 1 Arab-American, John Sununu, a republican from New Hampshire. He is also the youngest (43). • There are currently 16 women serving in the Senate, 11 democrats and 5 republicans. 35 women have served total.
Who Makes Up the House? As of the 2006 election, the 110th Congress, the Democrats took the majority of the House with 233 seats to the Republicans’ 202. The 110th Congress is also the most religiously diverse House in U.S. history with the first Muslim, the first two Buddhists, and thirty Jews. There are also 74 women, 42 African Americans, 27 Hispanics, 3 Asian Americans, and 1 Native American. Although this is an improvement in diversity and a better representation of our population, there is still room for improvement. Women, for example, still only make up about 16% of the House (and Senate) while they make-up nearly 50% of the country’s population. 23% of the ladies in Congress are women of color. There are two openly gay members of Congress. There is one openly gay man in the House (Barney Frank) and one openly lesbian woman (Tammy Baldwin).
Tammy Baldwin is the first woman elected to Congress from the state of Wisconsin, and is currently serving her fifth term. She was also the first ever openly gay non-incumbent to be elected to the House of Representatives.
Salary and Benefits The annual salary of each Representative is currently $165,200. The Speaker of the House and the Majority and Minority Leaders earn more. The Speaker earned $212,100 during the 109th Congress (January 4, 2005-January 3, 2007) while the party leaders earned $183,500 (the same as Senate leaders). A cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) increase takes effect annually unless Congress votes to not accept it. Congress sets members' salaries; however, the Constitution prohibits a change in wages from taking effect during the same Congress in which it was enacted. Representatives are also eligible for lifetime benefits after serving for five years, including a pension, health benefits, and social security benefits.
Representation and Reapportionment As the population of the United States not only grows but changes location, every 10 years, a census is taken. A census is simply a population count of the entire country. After the census, depending on which states have grown in population faster or slower than others, the amount of representatives each state receives in the House must be portioned out again, or reapportioned. For example, lets say our school had one really, REALLY giant pizza it could hand out the first day of each semester to all of the social studies classes (no toppings, that would be too expensive )… Reapportion: to redistribute seats in a legislative body based on population increase or decrease.
And every semester, although it was huge, that pizza was the same size every August and every January. Every semester we would have to count how many students were in Mr. Miller’s class, how many were in other classes and make sure the big classes got more and the smaller classes got less. It’s the same with the House of Representatives, the census, and reapportionment. (Except the pizza is representatives. Get it?)
Redistricting and Gerrymandering Redistricting is what the states must do after the census and after reapportionment. Redistricting means just what it sounds like; redrawing district boundaries after representatives have been added or taken away from your state. However, sometimes district lines are redrawn in a way to favor a particular party. This is known today as gerrymandering.
"The term gerrymandering is derived from Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814), the governor of Massachusetts from 1810 to 1812. In 1812, Governor Gerry signed a bill into law that redistricted his state to overwhelmingly benefit his party, the Republican Party. The opposition party, the Federalists, were quite upset. One of the congressional districts was shaped very strangely and, as the story goes, one Federalist remarked that the district looked like a salamander. “No,” said another Federalist, “it's a gerrymander”. The Boston Weekly Messenger brought the term gerrymander into common usage when it subsequently printed an editorial cartoon that showed the district in question with a monster's head, arms, and tail and named the creature a gerrymander."
Maine and Nebraska Maine and Nebraska both use an alternative method of distributing their electoral votes, called the Congressional District Method. Currently, these two states are the only two in the union that diverge from the traditional winner-take-all method of electoral vote allocation. With the district method, a state divides itself into a number of districts, allocating one of its state-wide electoral votes to each district. The winner of each district is awarded that district’s electoral vote, and the winner of the state-wide vote is then awarded the state’s remaining two electoral votes. This method has been used in Maine since 1972 and Nebraska since 1996, though since both states have adopted this modification, the statewide winners have consistently swept all of the state’s districts as well. Consequently, neither state has ever split its electoral votes. Although this method still fails to reach the full ideal of one-man one-vote, it has been proposed as a nationwide reform for the way in which Electoral votes are distributed. – fairvote.org
