US/Congress

US/Congress
Parent organization	US
Type	legal
Subgroups	•  United States House of Representatives •  United States Senate •  Government Accountability Office •  Library of Congress •  Congressional Research Service •  Congressional Budget Office
Subpage	•US/Congress/Corruption

Official Narrative

Article I of the US Constitution states "all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives." The constitution grants each chamber some unique powers, but requires that both chambers agree on legislation to be enacted.

Structure

Congress is split into two chambers, the House and the Senate. It writes national legislation by dividing work into special committees. Some members of Congress are elected by their peers to be officers of these committees. Lobbyists seem to do a lot of writing of legislation nowadays.

War Authorisation

The US Constitution gives Congress the exclusive power to declare war. Notwithstanding this fact, presidents have been quite capable of initializing hostlities without seeking congressional approval.

In 1970, Time magazine noted: "All told, it has been calculated, U.S. presidents have ordered troops into position or action without a formal congressional declaration a total of 149 times" before 1970.

In 1990 George H. W. Bush claimed he could attack Iraq and launch a "deliberate, unhurried, post-Cold War decision to start a war" without needing approval from the US Congress, prompting one a write for Time magazine to note that "Congress's war power has become the most flagrantly disregarded provision in the Constitution," and that the "real erosion (of Congressional authority to declare war) began after World War II."

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Plutocracy	“The United States is not a democracy, it is a plutocracy. The people don’t rule in the United States. Wealth rules, the corporations rule. They rule the Congress, they elect the president, they run the Pentagon. They own the media, which are the voices of the plutocracy.”	Ramsey Clark
Statecraft	“The financial frauds conducted by The Enterprise were designed to implicate, enrich and entrap a huge swath of the political class in DC. Fraudulent securities or oil and gas deals were offered to friends to enrich them and enemies to entrap them. In some cases, enemies were suckered in with easy profits on small investments only to be bankrupted when larger fraudulent investments imploded. By the time that the Iran Contra scandal made the headlines, such a large number of congressmen and DC insiders were implicated that any attempt to expose the scale of the scandal would have resulted in a near wholesale implication of the political class. In many ways, this endemic corruption is what makes political reform in Washington so difficult, the level of corruption is so pervasive that the political class has no choice but to cover for each other’s crimes or risk mutually assured destruction.”	Mark Gorton	22 November 2013
US/Deep state	“I have come to see that today's Congress itself is dominated by the deep state powers that profit from what I have called "America's Global War Machine." These so-called "statesmen" of America are as dedicated to the preservation of American dominance as were their British predecessors [a century ago].”	Peter Dale Scott	2015

 

Job here

Event	Job	Appointed	End
John Maury	CIA's Congressional liaison	1968	1974

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References

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