The Functions of Congress:

 The legislative process  in six stages:

1 Introduction

2 Committee stage

3 Timetabling

4 Floor debate and vote on passage

5 Conference committee (optional)

6 Presidential action

Although only the president has the formal power of veto, at each of the seven stages there is the potential to block a bill. This is an important part of the explanation as to why so few bills are ultimately passed.

The positive view of this complex legislative process is that it means the passage of legislation entails detailed scrutiny by experts, and requires a broad and sustained consensus, compromise and usually bipartisan support. Consequently, legislation will be thoroughly examined and should represent the most accurate reflection of the nation's collective wishes. This contrasts favourably with the UK government's control of Parliament, where legislation can be pushed through the House of Commons with token scrutiny and the support of a quiescent majority based, in the case of the Labour government of 2005-10 for example, on 35% of the vote.

The negative view is that the multiple blocking points means legislation can be halted by a few key individuals, especially committee chairs, who may be acting for any number of motives unconnected with the greater good of the public. In particular, it may allow wealthy campaign donors to exercise disproportionate influence through the obstruction of politicians they sponsor, which contributes to wider public cynicism about the role of money in Congress. The increasingly routine use of the filibuster in the Senate means that 41 senators, potentially representing less than a quarter of the population, can block what many might see as important legislation. Fundamentally, it is a system strongly biased in favour of the status quo; significant change may be difficult or impossible to bring about, or emerge in a final form so diluted as to be ineffectual.

Liberals and conservatives will disagree over the effectiveness of laws that are passed. Furthermore, conservatives may support the current complex legislative process because it makes it difficult to bring about change and can be used to stop the federal government from imposing new requirements on United States citizens and the states. Many Acts of Congress restrict states' ability to control their own affairs, causing conflict between federal and state government. It has often been conservatives who have objected to federal laws — such as the Voting Rights Act or the Affordable Care Act — because they undermine federalism. On the other hand, liberals may prefer a more efficient process in order to increase their chances of developing socially progressive legislation. Much depends on the nature of party control, however. Democrats who want the president to have greater power to make policy, arguing that the filibuster has been misused by the Senate during the Obama presidency, might be the same Democrats who strongly support the use of the filibuster to prevent the more conservative elements of President Trump's legislative agenda from coming to fruition. Only 3% of the bill introduced in to Congress are sent to the president.

in recent years, only about 1–3% of bills introduced in Congress actually become law, a big drop from the 6–7% that used to pass. Critics say the long, drawn-out legislative process, growing political polarisation, and gridlock—especially when there’s divided government—have made Congress less effective. At times, supermajority votes are needed, like the three-fifths majority required to end a Senate filibuster. Power is also spread out, with standing committees, and especially their chairs, holding significant influence, while party leaders have limited authority—Bob Dole once joked he was the “majority pleader.” The fact that both houses have equal power makes passing laws harder, unlike in the UK where one chamber can overrule the other. Even when one party controls both houses, it might not be the president’s party, and increasing partisanship since the 1980s means members often vote strictly along party lines, refusing to compromise. This leads to gridlock, with presidents struggling to get their proposals through. And even with unified government, agreement can be painfully slow—Clinton’s healthcare reform and George W. Bush’s social security reform didn’t even get a vote, and Trump believed unified government would guarantee major legislative wins.

Significant laws passed by Congress since 1993

• North American Free Trade Agreement (1993)

• Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act (1993)

• USA Patriot Act (2001)

• No Child Left Behind Act (2002)

• Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008)

• American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009)

• Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010) (‘Obamacare’)

• Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010)

• Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017)

•American Rescue Plan Act (2021): A $1.9 trillion stimulus package passed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. It provided $1,400 stimulus checks to millions, expanded unemployment benefits, and temporarily increased the Child Tax Credit, which experts say halved child poverty in its first year.

• Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021): Also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, this $1.2 trillion bill allocated $550 billion in new spending for roads, bridges, public transit, and high-speed internet.

• Inflation Reduction Act (2022): Often called Biden's signature achievement, it represents the largest climate investment in U.S. history ($369 billion). It also allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices, caps insulin at $35/month for seniors, and established a 15% corporate minimum tax.

• CHIPS and Science Act (2022): Invests $280 billion to bolster domestic semiconductor manufacturing and scientific research to reduce reliance on foreign technology, specifically from China.

• One Big Beautiful Bill Act (2025): Signed on July 4, 2025, this is the cornerstone of his second-term domestic policy. It permanently extended the 2017 individual tax cuts, created new deductions for tips and overtime pay, and established "Trump accounts" for children's savings. It also authorized $150 billion for border security and massive cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.

How Effective is Congress as a law maker?

Major legislation has regularly been passed, such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010)

(‘Obamacare’) which reformed healthcare.

• Low pass rate means only necessary legislation becomes law.

• The separation of powers and electoral cycle ensure compromise in the creation of legislation. Major legislation is

most likely to be passed during periods of unified government, such as the Tax and Jobs Act (2017).

• The need for supermajorities ensures broad consensus and bipartisanship to pass legislation.

• Congress can pass emergency legislation when it is required, as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economy (CARES) Act (2020) demonstrated when it passed the largest ever economic stimulus package in US history.

• Congress can reject legislation that is proposed by the executive, which is an important check on the power of the president.

However:

Not enough major legislation is passed. Only 1–3% of all bills become law, as compared to 6–7% of bills becoming law in the 1980s.

• Key individuals, such as the House Speaker and the House majority leader, dominate the legislative process.

• The use of ‘closed rules’ by the House Rules Committee has reduced the number of amendments made to House bills, which prevents legislation from being improved by members of the House.

• A united government can be passed without suitable scrutiny, while in a divided government, gridlock can prevent legislation from passing.

• Gridlock is common, particularly in the modern era of polarisation, which makes bipartisanship difficult.

• Presidential vetoes are rarely overturned since a supermajority of two-thirds is required in both houses to overturn them.

'Oversight' is the general term for Congress's monitoring of the activity of federal departments and agencies, and its scrutiny of presidential nominations and treaties by the Senate. Oversight is exercised through the standing committees, and the select committees as and when they are created.

The separation of powers and high levels of checks and balances in the Constitution put Congress in a strong position to provide checks on the executive branch in particular. Oversight of the executive branch occurs when Congress scrutinises or limits its actions.

 a major part of the oversight process comes from the committees created by Congress. They can check the executive in a number of ways.

·    Most committees are policy-based and conduct oversight based on their policy expertise. Typically they investigate a department and hold hearings for executive members.

·    The House Committee on Oversight and Reform has the sole role of scrutinising the executive. In the years before the 2016 election, committee chair Jason Chaffetz used the committee to investigate Hillary Clinton's use of a private email account for her work as Secretary of State.

·    Congress can create temporary committees to provide oversight if an event of concern arises. Congress created the House Select Committee on Benghazi in 2014, after the US ambassador to Libya was killed there.

There are a number of factors that should, in theory, make oversight more effective than in a parliamentary system such as the UK's. Traditionally, US party discipline is weak, and congressional careers are based around the permanent standing committees rather than promotion to the executive. However, although there have been high-profile exceptions, such as the investigations into Watergate and Iran Contra (both some time ago), the reality is that oversight is not always effectively carried out. More recently, as partisan loyalties have strengthened, they have acted to undermine oversight. When the presidency and Congress were controlled by the same party, as they were by Republicans 2002-06, oversight declined and Congress was accused of being asleep on the job. Since the Republicans took over the House in 2011, the Oversight Committee under the chairmanship of Darrell Issa has vigorously scrutinised the administration on a variety of issues such as the 'Fast and Furious' operation and the IRS-Tea Party affair. However, it has been seen by many as being more preoccupied with inflicting political damage on the president than carrying out an objective investigation.

The motivation of members of Congress is also a factor. Like all politicians, members of Congress are driven in large part by a desire to be re-elected, and oversight offers them little by way of benefits either to themselves or their constituents. Nor does it improve their chances of re-election. Some members, such as Darrell Issa, will seek to make a name for themselves as zealous pursuers of executive incompetence but they are relatively few in number.

As a rule congressional oversight of the executive is only really effective when Congress is not controlled by the president’s party. Almost all modern-day examples of the Senate’s rejection of presidential nominations, whether to the executive or judicial branches, have come when the president’s party has not controlled the Senate. 

From 2016 to 2018, Trump had a majority in both the House and Senate. This changed when Democrats took control of the House from 2018 to 2020. Despite significant concerns about Trump's presidency, the Republican Congress conducted very few investigations. However, just a few months after the Democrats won the House in the mid-term elections, fourteen committees began looking into over fifty issues related to Trump's time in office. These investigations included topics like communications between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, White House security clearances, Trump’s finances, his emergency powers for building a wall, family separations for asylum seekers, and appointments at the Environmental Protection Agency involving big corporations. The most important investigations led to hearings that resulted in the House impeaching Trump.

2020 Two examples:

Case study  CNN  Congress Russia investigations

Case Study  Trump's Taxes

Unlike all recent presidents Trump did not reveal his tax record when he was elected. After the Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives committees began oversight investigations in to Trumps finances and subpoenaed his tax records - Trump fought this in the courts. The Supreme Court decided that while in principle Congress had the right to subpoena the president's finances they had not refined their request narrowly enough and so returned the case to the lower courts (to be decided sometime in 2021) but they did decided that the President could be subpoenaed by the New York prosecutors instigating his possible obstruction of justice. The cases were Trump v Mazars (returned to lower courts) and Trump v Vance (New York)

Case study Subpoena of Steve Bannon  2021

How significant and effective is congressional oversight, really? For some, especially during divided government, it’s seen as a polite way to try to embarrass the president and their administration. In 2007, Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina called Democrats’ oversight of George W. Bush “political posturing and demagoguing” that “hasn’t really changed anything.” Five years later, the roles were reversed when House Republicans held hearings in at least six committees on the September 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. Two Senate committees also got involved. Altogether, these eight committees interviewed 252 witnesses, produced 13 separate reports totaling nearly 2,000 pages, and asked over 3,000 questions. While few Republicans would admit it, much of this activity was driven by the fact that Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State at the time, was the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.

In Congress, oversight comes in many forms including:

• • Hearings and investigations conducted by standing or special congressional committees.

  • Consulting with or getting reports directly from the president.

  • Giving its advice and consent for certain high-level presidential nominations and for treaties.

  • Impeachment proceedings conducted in the House and tried in the Senate.

  • House and Senate proceedings under the 25th Amendment should the president become disabled or the office of the vice president become vacant.

  • Senators and representatives serving on presidentially appointed commissions.

  • Special studies conducted by congressional committees and support agencies such as the Congressional Budget Office, the General Accountability Office, the Office of Technology Assessment, and the Congressional Research Service.

• Two famous examples of oversight 

  • In the late 1960s, televised hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the so-called Pentagon Papers solidified public opposition to continued U.S. participation in the Vietnam War, hastening the end of the conflict.

  • Less than a year after details of the 1973 Watergate scandal were exposed, the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon resulted in his resignation from office. 

Congress' limits on the Supreme Court

The ultimate power Congress holds over the Supreme Court is to overturn a decision. Using an amendment to the Constitution, Congress can reverse or amend a court ruling. When Congress and the states lowered the voting age to 18 in the 26th amendment of 1971, it effectively overturned the Mitchell v Oregon 1970 ruling, which allowed states to retain the age of 21 as the voting age for state elections if they wished to. However, this restriction on the Court is limited by the difficulty of amending the Constitution. The vast majority of Supreme Court rulings are not subject to an amendment effort; those that are, usually fail.

The other key aspect of the relationship between Congress and the Supreme Court is the Senate's role in ratifying presidential nominations. This is a contentious area, but the Senate cannot

check the Court as a whole, nor does it have control over a justice. The Senate's role is limited to conducting hearings and then voting on a nominee. Once that person becomes a Justice, there is no threat of removal from the Senate.

Congress has two other powers in relation to the Supreme Court, neither of which has any impact on the Court as a whole on a year-to-year basis.

·    Individual Justices can be impeached and removed by Congress. The last such attempt to remove a Justice was in 1804, when Justice Samuel Chase was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate.

·    The Constitution gives Congress the authority to determine the total number of Justices on the Court. The has been settled at nine since the Civil War. Congress could increase this number to allow a president to appoint new members of the Court and establish a majority, but this has neither been used or threatened since the Roosevelt presidency.