6 Congressional politics
The Congress of the United States is, without doubt, the most powerful rep-
resentative assembly in the world today. This is not merely to reiterate the
fact of the power and wealth of the United States – it is also recognition
of the fact that, as a legislature, Congress continues to exercise a degree of
independent decision-making power far greater than that retained by the
other legislatures of the Western democracies. It is true that, like all legis-
lative bodies in the complex modern world, its power has declined relative
to that of the so-called ‘executive branch’ of government. Increasingly, it is
the president and his administration that initiate policy and provide leader-
ship in legislative affairs, but the Congress makes effective decisions upon
domestic and foreign policy, upon the role of government in society, and the
way in which government activities will be financed. The president can ini-
tiate policy, and he can urge it upon Congress with all the resources at his
command, but he cannot determine what legislation shall pass, when it will be
passed, or in exactly what form it will pass. Once legislation has been intro-
duced into the British House of Commons by the government it is virtually
certain that it will be passed, but one can only predict what might happen to
legislation in Congress, and such predictions, however well-informed, may
well turn out to be wrong.
The parameters of congressional power
The power of Congress as a policy-making body is, of course, the result of the
whole context of the constitutional and political forces within which it oper-
ates. The internal structure of power and the organisation of the Congress
reflect this context. We have seen that the Constitution of the United States
gives to each of the two Houses of Congress a high degree of legal autonomy,
in relation both to each other and to the president. The president has no
power to dissolve Congress, nor does he have any direct legislative author-
ity. He can send messages to Congress requesting action, and he has a lim-
ited power of veto over congressional acts of which he disapproves. The two
Houses of Congress have equal power under the Constitution, except that