Gregarious Gov 1 - An Overview of Power in the U.S.

Hello wonderful humans and welcome back to... what are we gonna call this while I’m not talking about history? Gregarious Government? Sure, why not?

Anyway, this month I have a rabbit trail down the path of Government! So we’re gonna talk about some interesting things about separation of powers and some interesting things you may not know about. Let’s go!

Okay, so first let’s define government. Government is a set of rules and institutions people set up so they can function together as a unified society. People do this in different ways. Some do monarchies, some do dictatorships… but we have a democracy here in America, so that’s what we’re gonna be talking about.

First let's talk Congress. This is in two parts as most of you know -- the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House has an amount of representatives based on population, and the Senate has two senators for every state. As you may remember from Part 2, the only reason we even have a senate is because Delaware threatened not to join the Union if we didn’t have equal representation, and Madison saw it as a necessary evil.

Both houses have some particular things they alone handle. House of representatives has 3:

1. It’s in charge of impeaching people and all the investigations involved with that. 
2.  All tax related laws run through the House.
3. The House decides a presidential candidate when there is no clear winner. 

Another fun fact is that the House officials were the only democratically elected ones--everything else ran through the Electoral College (and the president still does!) because the Founders didn’t trust the people to make the right decisions.

The Senate also has 3 things it does.

1. It holds impeachment trials. 
2. It handles treaties. 
3. It ratifies officials appointed by the President. This may not seem super important to us, but trust me, it definitely is.

Now on to the President! We’re aware of a lot of the things he does because he’s the leader of his political party and thus gets the most news time. Originally the President was designed to be pretty weak, but outside of the constitution he’s pretty powerful.

Executive action, for example, is an action the President can take to put something in place without the approval of Congress. The judiciary still reserves the right to declare whatever the action is unconstitutional, though.

His other big power, which most of us know about, is the veto. Even if a law passes both houses he can still shoot it down. But then he can be shot down with a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress. Huh.

Finally, the judiciary. They also have three main functions: Settling disputes, interpreting the law, and setting expectation for future actions. It’s because of the judiciary that we know that doing business will be fair, because people who don’t follow it will be punished. Catch the drift? The judiciary is much more complex than this, but that’s for another time.