Congress is the legislative, or law-making, division of the United States government. It was the first article to be listed in the United States Constitution. The Constitution establishes the system and power that Congress has. It states that “all legislative powers should be vested in a congress”. Congress is one of three branches of the US government, the others being the executive branch and judicial branch, which balance each other in order to prevent any one branch from gaining too much power.

There are two divisions within Congress. These are called the Senate and the House of Representatives. Although the two divisions meet in the same place, The Capitol in Washington DC, they work separately. The Senate consists of a total of 100 senators, with two representatives from each state. The House of Representatives, however, bases its number of representatives for each state on the size of the individual state’s population. The larger the population of the state, the more representatives it has. The House of Representatives currently has around 435 members. [Read more...]