Legislative Power

Congress itself is internally divided in the sense that we have a House and we have Senate, and that's not an obvious structure. Before the Constitution we had the Articles of Confederation, and in that system we had a unicameral, one-chamber Congress and there are at least one state that has a unicameral legislature rather than a bicameral legislature. You have bicameral legislation for many different reasons, but one of the reasons is to slow down legislation to make it more difficult to pass, because it's not enough to have a majority in just one chamber. There is a check on the actions of Congress by virtue of the fact that there are two chambers. Now beyond that the Constitution doesn't require much in terms of Congressional structure, but we know from our practice that Congress often creates committees that first digest and process information and then propose bills, and then those bills then get sent to the floor. There are further internal checks on how Congress operates that aren't actually contemplated or required by the Constitution. Then once both the House and the Senate pass a bill, it goes to the President, that's the presentment part of our law making process and the President then has an opportunity to veto it, or to sign it. The veto, if issued, then the law has to go back to the originating chamber and the originating chamber has to decide whether to override the veto and both chambers have to override by two thirds majority. The idea is if the President has significant objections Congress should take those into account in deciding to enact the law but the President isn't quite the third chamber. If you had a true third chamber then the President's veto would essentially be absolute. So that's the way the internal law making process works and you can see that there are many checks there. There's the check of having two Congresses, two chambers having to act and then there's the check of the President having a veto. Then Congress has other checks on outside branches, there's the impeachment process of course where Congress can impeach, and convict, and remove executives and judges. Individual chambers of Congress have checks on other branches, most prominently the Senate can check the President's making of treaties and the President's ability to appoint. So there are a number of checks that Congress wields collectively or that one chamber might wield against the President or the Courts.