A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works

INTRODUCTION

Maybe you aren’t 100 percent sure what the secretary of defense does all day. Or you’re feeling a bit iffy as to what free speech actually means. Perhaps you’ve been pretending you know the definition of federalism.

What luck, then, that you’ve found yourself in possession of the basics of this democratic republic all in one place. This is your user’s guide to American democracy, giving you the fundamentals on everything from the presidency to our election system to our basic civil rights. We parse the great hulking mass of our government into essential knowledge.

In order to enjoy and preserve this democracy, we have to know how it works. Understanding your rights as an American citizen can protect your job, your health, and your freedom. An awareness of the way things work around here is valuable armor. But it’s a lot to remember, so we wrote it down in a book for you.

We do this for a living as the hosts of a public radio show and podcast, Civics 101. We guide people through the maze of American democracy—from the Bill of Rights to executive privilege to Congressional investigations. Our show is a primer that leaves listeners better prepared to be engaged, aware citizens. Civics 101 was started in 2016 as a response to a flood of questions coming into the station, including, Can he/she/they really do that? What does the secretary of state do all day? What is the Defense Department? and How is the House different from the Senate? It was a wonderful opportunity for us to admit we barely knew the answers ourselves, and to call up the experts who do. We’ve relied on the information we’ve gleaned from them to write this primer. The information in these pages was gathered from our country’s most primary sources, the foundational documents, and what we found to be the most helpful of the nearly 250 years of scholarship and debate that have swirled around this democratic experiment since it first launched.

Within this book you’ll find what we have learned over years of wait, what? and "so that’s how it works, and can you explain that to us one more time?" We’ve played democracy’s interpreter so you don’t have to. As far as your family is concerned, you’ve always understood the finer points of McCulloch v. Maryland.

THE POWERS THAT BE

YOU CAN’T HAVE IT ALL

If there’s one thing you have to know about the power structure of our federal government, it is that it, like Gaul, like Lear’s kingdom, is divided into three. Our U.S. Constitution is the longest-surviving government document, and the first thing it does (after it says hello) is lay out who does what. This system is dependent upon the separation of powers and checks and balances. And these are not the same thing.

Separation of Powers: This just means that our government is divided into three branches, and no branch has the same powers as any other; they are completely independent and complementary.

Checks and Balances: This means that no branch of the government can be too powerful, as every major power can be checked, or blocked, by another branch. In James Madison’s essay Federalist 51, he said that in this system ambition must be made to counteract ambition. He knew that politicians would be passionate about their ideals and would do anything to advancethem. These checks prevent one branch from unilaterally setting policy. Here’s a diagram of how the branches keep one another in line.

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THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH

At the outset, it seems like the House of Representatives and the Senate do pretty much the same thing.

Senators and representatives drive, walk, or take the secret tiny electric underground train to their respective chambers. There, they propose legislation, talk about it, and vote on it. But while they share many powers, these two houses are not both alike in dignity. Or perceived clout, at least. The length of terms, number of members, unique powers, and methods of legislation make the House and Senate as different as chalk and cheese. But before we do a side-by-side comparison, let’s get some terminology out of the way.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT CONGRESS

When we speak of Congress, we’re talking about both the House of Representatives and the Senate. They are that mighty first branch, the legislative, whose powers are established in Article I of the Constitution.

CONSTITUTION 101: Our constitution consists of seven articles written on four parchment pages. Article I, which establishes the legislative branch, gets far and away the most ink of them all, coming in at just over two pages by itself. And words are power! The more you have, the more things you can do. The founders clearly intended that Congress, not the president, was to be the most powerful arm of our government. That said, they also didn’t want a complete legislative dictatorship, so they carefully explained what Congress could and could not do.

While they are both technically houses, when we say the House we mean the House of Representatives. Those in the House are addressed as congresswoman/-man/-person. And while senators do work in Congress, they’re addressed as senator.

WHY TWO HOUSES?

Why not just have one house and be done with it? Why not a nice, pat, unicameral legislature that passes bills for the president to sign? Well, that was how we did things under the Articles of Confederation,¹ our much maligned first constitution. And to be fair, there are some successful one-house legislatures out there (lookin’ at you, Nebraska!), but the bicameral system was born as a solution to one of the fiercest debates at the Constitutional Convention …

THE GREAT COMPROMISE

When the fifty-five delegates from twelve colonies (Rhode Island was a no-show²) were hammering out our new system of government in 1787, there arose a seemingly insurmountable issue of representation. How many people from each state should be elected to Congress? Before the convention even started, James Madison had drafted the Virginia Plan (also called the Randolph Plan or the amusingly blunt Big State Plan), which said that representation in Congress should be based on the number of free inhabitants. Enslaved Americans would initially not be counted toward apportionment. A big whanging state like New York would therefore have many times the power of a state like Delaware. The smaller states were more likely to back William Paterson’s New Jersey Plan (only referred to as the Little State Plan when New Jersey wasn’t in the room), which gave each state one vote, regardless of its size. And thus we got to the Great Compromise, where one house, the House of Representatives, was proportionate to the population of free inhabitants in each state, with enslaved people counting as three-fifths of a person (Native Americans not counting at all), and the other chamber, the Senate, consisting of two people from each state.

CONSTITUTION 101: The three-fifths compromise, within Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, is one of the two places slavery is mentioned in the Constitution, the other being its abolition within the Thirteenth Amendment. One of the most contentious battles about representation in the House was whether to count enslaved people (who had no vote) as part of the population. If they were counted, that would dramatically increase that state’s presence in the legislature. James Wilson, a vocal opponent to slavery, proposed that enslaved people should count as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation. This compromise secured southern support for the Constitution, but gave slave-states inordinate legislative power.

So that’s how we got here.

REPRESENTATION AND TERM LIMITS: THE HOUSE

There are 435 members of the House of Representatives. Each one represents a chunk of a state, called a Congressional District.

GERRYMANDERING: Gerrymandering (a word that comes from combining former Vice President Elbridge Gerry with salamander) is drawing Congressional Districts to favor one party or the other. A nice little case history of this is the 2016 Congressional Election, when there was about a fifty-fifty split of popular votes for Republican and Democratic reps. But due to those maps, the Republican party gained forty more seats in the House.

That number, 435, was chosen as a cap by the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. The number of reps from any state, however, can change.

For example, California has fifty-three reps now, but it only had thirty in the 1950s.³ If one state loses a Rep due to a decreasing population, some growing state will snap it up.

As to term limits, they are two years. No representative is safe. Every two years, all 435 of them are up for reelection.

BUT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

That means the House can be a wild and crazy place. A place that is subject to the ever-changing whims of the American people.

Because the House is refreshed so frequently, its representatives can campaign and vote on hot-button, often controversial issues. From the Anti-Masonic Movement⁴ to the Tea Party to the Green New Deal, the House has a rich history of people elected to shake things up.

Likewise, because they each represent their smaller Congressional District and not the entire state, house reps are more familiar with their constituents.

The price that the House pays for its closeness to the people is its reputation as the lower house, because they each represent fewer people and hold less power. But they are every bit as important to our government as the lofty Senate.

REPRESENTATION AND TERM LIMITS: THE SENATE

No complicated mathematical formula needed! Two people from every state. One hundred total.

Term limits are a little trickier in the Senate. A senator is elected for a whopping six-year term, but these terms are staggered, so every two years about a third of them are up for election. Senators belong to Class I, II, or III. This isn’t a ranking of any kind, it just determines when they’re up for reelection. Class II is up for election in 2020, Class III in 2022, and so on. Two senators from the same state are never in the same class. This was designed to ensure there’s some living memory in the Senate, so that when the new kids come to town there’s a majority that’s been there for some time already.

CONSTITUTION 101: But it hasn’t always been this way! The original text of the Constitution said, The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof. They were elected by the state legislators, not by the people! In the early 1900s there was a growing fear that senators were buying their seats from corrupt state legislatures. The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, changed those words chosen by the Legislature thereof to elected by the people thereof.

BUT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

Senators have a nice long stretch in office, and therefore don’t have to start campaigning ten minutes after their acceptance speech. Because they represent an entire state, there is less room for radicalism, and leaders in the Senate work hard to quell any members who try to buck the party line.

The staggered election of senators has an enormous impact on our government. The Classes were divvied up during our first Senate in 1789, and when new states were added to the union, their two Senate seats were assigned the next available Classes, by drawing lots if it was more than one state at a time.

And the ramifications of this? Let’s say the Senate is pretty evenly split between the parties; if the Class that’s up for election is mostly from very conservative states, you’re going to get a Republican Senate majority with relatively little effort.

And finally, because Democrats have more voters in big cities, the Senate tends to swing more conservative. New York City has millions of Democrats, but their state gets just two senators, same as the dozen less-populated, more-Republican-dominated states.

WHO GETS TO DO IT: THE HOUSE

It’s pretty lax, actually! The Constitution says any American who is twenty-five or over, lives in the state they’re trying to represent, and has been a U.S. citizen for at least seven years can run for office.

WHO GETS TO DO IT ACTUALLY

In 1786, the average age of a member of the House was forty-five years old. That number has risen steadily ever since, with the 115th Congress, from 2017 to 2019, being the oldest in history, averaging 57.8.

But while the trend is old, white, wealthy, and male, the 2018 election ushered in a significantly younger House. Incoming members of Congress in 2018 were on average forty-seven years old, a full decade younger. The 116th Congress is also the most diverse in U.S. history, although there is clearly still a long way to go: 106 women, fifty-five Black Americans, forty-five Latinx Americans, twenty Asian Americans, and four Native Americans.

Money is certainly important in a House campaign, but not as important as it is for the Senate. In competitive House races in 2018, the mean spending on campaigns was about 4 million dollars. Since you’re representing a portion of your state, name recognition in your district is the most important thing. This is gained through local television ads and radio spots, plastering roads with campaign signs, attending events, and, most of all, knocking on doors.

Finally, it helps to be a Christian. According to a poll from the Pew Research Center, 53 percent of the current House is Protestant, 32 percent Catholic, and 1.4 percent Mormon. There are only three Muslims and one Buddhist. Fourteen members of the House answered Don’t Know or Refuse to Answer on the poll.

WHO GETS TO DO IT: THE SENATE

The rules are a little more stringent for the Senate, but not overwhelmingly so. The Constitution states in Article I, Section 3, that a senator must be thirty years old, nine years a U.S. citizen, and an inhabitant of the state they are running in.

WHO GETS TO DO IT ACTUALLY

While the aforementioned traits of being white, wealthy, old, and male help you out in the House, they really help out if you’re running for the Senate. And this is in no small amount related to the staggering amount of money you need to raise to run a Senate campaign. The average is over $10 million. In the narrow 2018 race for a Senate seat from Texas, Ted Cruz spent $45 million and Beto O’Rourke spent $78 million.

So, very wealthy. And if you want to know how white, take a guess at how many Black people have served in the entire history of the Senate.

Yup, ten. That’s all. As of this writing, there have only been ten Black people in the U.S. Senate.

Race and religious faith break down along similar lines as they do in the House, just with a significantly smaller portion of non-white and non-Christian senators. Two interesting stats, however, are gender (a full 25 percent of the Senate is female) and occupation (50 percent—half!—of our senators previously served in the House of Representatives). Just like it helps to have been a senator to be a president, working in the House is a way to get your foot in the senatorial door.

SHARED POWERS

Both Houses have one power above all else: Make the darn laws that run our country.

The process for that differs in each, but basically speaking, bills are proposed by senators or representatives: a small percentage get voted on in one chamber; and if they are passed, they cross over to the other chamber. If they pass there, too, they go to the president, who then signs them into law or vetoes them. A veto kills a bill, unless two-thirds of both the House and Senate vote to override it, in which case it becomes a law without the president’s signature.

Either House can initiate constitutional amendments.

With a two-thirds majority in both Houses, they can together override a presidential veto.

Every year the president submits a budget request to both Houses, and they each write and vote on their own budget resolutions.

Either House can pass a resolution to declare war,⁵which they’ve done eleven times. The last time was against Romania in 1942.

Likewise, either House can establish and levy taxes for the support of an army.

Congress establishes rules about immigration and naturalization.

And finally, they can coin money (as in mint quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies), print dollar bills, and regulate interstate commerce.

One important point about the powers of Congress: If the rules aren’t specifically outlined in the Constitution, they can be altered. Every two years, the new Congress writes its rules. They can create new committees, new protocols for bringing bills to the floor, and even new rules for the filibuster. Thus, the information on the following pages is by no way set in stone. One of the most interesting things about our government is that while the Constitution is ironclad and very difficult to amend, the way the three branches wield their power is malleable and has changed over the centuries.

UNIQUE POWERS: THE HOUSE

Initiate money bills.

If you’re like most of us and enjoy the gentle clink of a fat leather satchel of coins hitting the bar at the tavern, you’ll enjoy the expression the power of the purse. While both Houses initiate bills, only the House of Representatives can initiate bills regarding federal spending.

CONSTITUTION 101: Article I, Section 7 says, All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives. But there are ways around this. The Senate can take a proposed bill from the House, gut everything, and change it to be about raising money wherever they want. Sure, it was technically initiated in the House, but it has zero actual House content. Also, all bets are off if the president declares a National Emergency. Money can come from just about anywhere when that happens.

These bills can give money, like an appropriation bill to a government agency, or they can eliminate funding.⁶

Break a tie.

Three times in history, none recently,⁷ there was a tie for electoral votes for president. The House is charged with breaking that tie. It takes 270 votes to win, and it seems improbable to have a 269/269 tie in an election, but a tie includes when no party gets to that magic number. In 1968, the pro-segregation Independent George Wallace got forty-eight electoral votes, which wasn’t enough to force a tie, but proved it could happen again with a strong third-party candidate.

Initiate impeachment.

The tools of investigation! Any member of the House can initiate impeachment with a resolution and start the ball rolling. It goes to the House Rules Committee and then the House Committee on the Judiciary, who investigate grounds of impeachment and report back to the House for a vote. And unlike in the Senate, where it takes a two-thirds majority to convict, the House requires just a basic majority of votes to impeach.

If the house votes yea, then the individual has been impeached, which just means accused. It then goes to the Senate, where the trial takes place, and only then, if the Senate votes against them, will the individual be removed from office, and possibly prevented from holding federal office again. This is why even though impeachment proceedings have happened about sixty times, only twenty of those have made it through the House, and only a meager eight have made it through the Senate, resulting in the official being removed from office. And while we may think of it as being something reserved for presidents, all eight were federal judges.

Three presidents have been impeached in U.S. history: Andrew Johnson (for violating the Tenure of Office Act, replacing his secretary of war before his tenure was up), Bill Clinton (for lying under oath and obstruction of justice regarding a sexual relationship he had with Monica Lewinsky), and Donald Trump (for abuse of power and obstruction of justice regarding his soliciting of election assistance from Ukraine). Richard Nixon was going to face impeachment for obstruction of justice regarding the Watergate break-in, but resigned upon learning he lacked the votes in the Senate to prevent removal.

UNIQUE POWERS: THE SENATE

Confirm appointments.

This power is not found in the weighty first Article of the Constitution, but in Article II, Section 2. And it’s often called the advice and consent power. The text reads that the president shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States. So the president picks, and the Senate gives the