Starter Kit: Legislative Branch

Civics 101

NHPR

Education, History, Supreme Court, American History, Elections, Democracy, Society & Culture, Government, Civics, Politics, Social Studies

4.6 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2019

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There are 535 people who meet in the hallowed halls of Capitol Hill. They go in, legislation comes out. You can watch the machinations of the House and Senate chambers on C-SPAN, you can read their bills online. But what are the rules of engagement? Where does your Senator go every day, and what do they do? What does it mean to represent the American people? Our guides to the U.S. Legislative branch are Congressman Chris Pappas, Eleanor Powell, Stefani Langehennig and Emmitt Riley.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
0:09.6	This is Chris Papis, on the phone with me a few weeks ago. He's a first-term congressman
0:14.4	in the U.S. House of Representatives, and he also just so happens to be my representative
0:19.2	in New Hampshire's first congressional district. I called him up to ask, in short, what he does all day?
0:26.3	What does it mean to be a representative? You get voted into office, you head off to
0:30.8	Washington, and then what? You know, there are really two ways that you look to be a good
0:36.4	representative. One is by working on legislation here in Washington that can be of help to people
0:44.5	back in New Hampshire. Another major way is by serving a constituent very directly and helping
0:50.7	them with issues that they may have before government. Lawmaking and problem solving,
0:56.1	hashing it out with politicians in Washington, and then hashing it out with the public in your district.
1:01.6	Being a member of Congress is all meetings and handshakes and promises. It's two houses,
1:07.9	535 people, lots of money, and very few laws passed. This is the Civics 101 stutter kit. This is
1:17.2	our legislative branch. I'm Hannah McCarthy, and I'm Nick Capodice. We're going to come back to
1:21.9	Chris Papis, Capitol Hill, and this idea of the good representative in just a moment because the
1:27.9	whole point of Congress is representation. But first, let's at the stage, the House, the Senate.
1:35.5	Two houses, both the like and dignity. Not quite. The two chambers actually used to be much more
1:41.0	similar originally in Congress, and they've sort of evolved along different paths.
1:46.1	Eleanor Powell stopping us from going full Romeo and Juliet here. So they used to both be sort of
1:51.6	freewheeling chambers without a lot of rules and without a lot of structure. The House used to
1:56.0	look a lot more like the Senate. Eleanor Powell is the Booth Fowler Associate Professor of Political
2:00.9	Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So constitutionally, states are given two senators
2:07.4	each and representatives are portioned based on population. The first house of reps had 64
	...

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