How is representatives in the senate determined

During the legislative process, however, the initial bill can undergo drastic changes. After being introduced, a bill is referred to the appropriate committee for review. There are 17 Senate committees, with 70 subcommittees, and 23 House committees, with subcommittees. The committees are not set in stone, but change in number and form with each new Congress as required for the efficient consideration of legislation. Each committee oversees a specific policy area, and the subcommittees take on more specialized policy areas.

A bill is first considered in a subcommittee, where it may be accepted, amended, or rejected entirely. If the members of the subcommittee agree to move a bill forward, it is reported to the full committee, where the process is repeated again. Throughout this stage of the process, the committees and subcommittees call hearings to investigate the merits and flaws of the bill. They invite experts, advocates, and opponents to appear before the committee and provide testimony, and can compel people to appear using subpoena power if necessary.

If the full committee votes to approve the bill, it is reported to the floor of the House or Senate, and the majority party leadership decides when to place the bill on the calendar for consideration. If a bill is particularly pressing, it may be considered right away. Others may wait for months or never be scheduled at all.

When the bill comes up for consideration, the House has a very structured debate process. Each member who wishes to speak only has a few minutes, and the number and kind of amendments are usually limited. In the Senate, debate on most bills is unlimited — Senators may speak to issues other than the bill under consideration during their speeches, and any amendment can be introduced. Senators can use this to filibuster bills under consideration, a procedure by which a Senator delays a vote on a bill — and by extension its passage — by refusing to stand down.

A supermajority of 60 Senators can break a filibuster by invoking cloture, or the cession of debate on the bill, and forcing a vote. Once debate is over, the votes of a simple majority pass the bill.

A bill must pass both houses of Congress before it goes to the President for consideration. Though the Constitution requires that the two bills have the exact same wording, this rarely happens in practice.

To bring the bills into alignment, a Conference Committee is convened, consisting of members from both chambers. The members of the committee produce a conference report, intended as the final version of the bill.

Each chamber then votes again to approve the conference report. Depending on where the bill originated, the final text is then enrolled by either the Clerk of the House or the Secretary of the Senate, and presented to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate for their signatures.

In , George W. Bush won Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Nevada all by less than four points — Florida famously by only a few hundred votes. In , Donald Trump won Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin all by less than two points, while Hillary Clinton ran up massive majorities in big states like California and New York and point wins, respectively.

But these circumstances came about because of the very specific electoral patterns in these elections. They are not signs of a permanent disadvantage for coastal, urban, nonwhite voters, or liberal voters generally, in the Electoral College. There will probably be a lot of votes from these groups wasted in California for the foreseeable future. However, if Democrats could flip Florida, the Pennsylvania-Michigan-Wisconsin trio, or Arizona into to narrow wins, the efficiency of their vote distribution improves substantially.

In , for example, very narrow wins in Florida, Ohio, and Virginia led Barack Obama to win a much larger percentage of the electoral vote than the popular vote. And, of course, if there is a bit more of a regional realignment and Democrats ever narrowly win Texas, they could potentially have a big Electoral College advantage. Because relatively small shifts in the location of the voting strength of the two parties can lead one party or the other to perform better in the Electoral College than the popular vote, it makes more sense to think of the Electoral College as introducing unpredictable random changes to election outcomes, rather than consistently favoring certain types of voters.

This is not a good system. But, with the distribution of voters and the trends we have now, it is not likely to consistently advantage some types of voters over others in the future. Both the Senate and the Electoral College are strange constitutional relics, whose problems would be hard to fix.

But the difference is that, for the Electoral College, there is a viable plan for curing its pathologies. Currently, 15 states with electoral votes have passed the National Popular Vote Compact NPV , under which states set in state law a policy that they will give all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner.

The Compact is only 81 electoral votes short of a majority. This plan seems constitutionally and legally viable. It is always hard to make predictions like this. Yet I think it is very possible that states would allow the NPV to govern their electoral votes even in this circumstance.

The key is changing expectations. Hopefully, they will think about it less and less the longer the NPV is in effect. The NPV will be the legal status quo in the states.

Once the national popular vote system becomes the new norm among elites and the mass public, the national popular vote winner will have much more legitimacy than the losing candidate among the mass public and elites. I think it is plausible to expect state legislators to leave that status quo alone. Compared to this, the challenges to fixing or abolishing the Senate are much bigger. There is no plausible fix like the NPV without a constitutional amendment.

One reading of this is that, rather than the three-fourths of states that must approve regular constitutional amendments, every state would need to approve a change to Senate seat allocation. Given these limitations, we are left to nibble at the edges of the main problem. Here is a list of what could be done to improve the Senate and what would be required to implement the reform.

First, you could abolish the filibuster super-majority requirement in the last realm where it still exists: regular legislation not eligible for reconciliation. This could be done by a majority vote of the Senate in the same way that the filibuster on presidential nominations was ended in recent years. Second, you could reduce the bias in Senate representation toward rural and white voters by admitting the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states. Both could be admitted by majority votes in both houses of Congress.

There is some constitutional challenge with admitting DC, in that the admitting legislation would have to allocate a very small portion of DC as the remaining seat of government, because Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution says there is space set aside for the seat of government, although it doesn't set a minimum size.

Legislation could leave just the footprint of the Capitol Building as the seat of government. The legislation would also have to state that the District that is referenced in the 23rd Amendment , which gives DC electoral votes, refers to what is now the new state, not to the new smaller seat of government.

A more detailed discussion of how this might work is too long for this article. Needless to say, there could be some challenges. Third, even though changing Senate representation requires the unanimous consent of the states, you could pass an ordinary constitutional amendment that leaves the allocation of Senators the same but strips the entire Senate of some or most of its authority.

The amendment could say that responsibility for judicial confirmations would switch to the House and some bills would no longer require Senate approval. However, an Amendment like this would require approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress including the Senate itself and three-fourths of the states. The fourth and ultimate way to solve the problem of the Senate would be to abolish it altogether or turn it into a body that, while smaller than the House, also allocates seats according to state population size.

But as mentioned above, this is impossible. According to Article 5, this would require the approval of every single state. The Electoral College is a constitutional nuisance that created big problems in and but poses fewer problems in the long run, even as it is now.

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. To raise and support an army and navy and make rules for their governance. To provide for a militia reserving to the states the right to appoint militia officers and to train the militia under congressional rule. To exercise exclusive legislative powers over the seat of government that is, the District of Columbia and over places purchased to be federal facilities forts, arsenals, dockyards, and "other needful buildings.

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