6. The executive approval.
Having passed the Senate it is signed by the presiding officer of that body and is then sent to the President for his signature. The President, as will be shown a little later, may sign it, veto it, or allow it to become a law without his signature.
Conference committees.
If one chamber amends a measure, and the other chamber agrees to the amendment, the bill also goes directly to the President. But what happens in case either the Senate or the House make amendments to which the other chamber does not agree? That is just what very frequently occurs. In such cases a conference committee is appointed, made up as a rule of three members from each chamber. These conferees meet and try to reach a common ground by compromise. Then, when they have agreed, they report to their respective chambers and the latter must accept or reject the conference report without further amendment.
The value of experience in Congress.
Some Tricks of the Lawmaker’s Trade.—Lawmaking is a skilled profession; it takes the average congressman most of his first term to learn just how it is done. He must acquire a knowledge of the rules, written and unwritten, the traditions, and what may rightly be called the “tricks of the trade”. Ability as an orator does not count for much, particularly in the House. The house chamber is a big, noisy place where only a leather-lunged speaker can make himself clearly heard. Congressmen, moreover, do not take kindly to long speeches; they expect members of the House to say what they have to say in five or ten minutes. If a congressman desires to make an impression upon the voters of his home district by sending them accounts of his able speeches in their behalf, he can usually obtain from the House, by unanimous consent, permission to have his speech printed at the public expense and distributed without its ever having been delivered on the floor of the chamber at all. When long speeches are made it is usually to waste the time of Congress and prevent the passage of some measure to which the speakers are opposed.[[118]]
Filibusters.
Attempts to talk a measure to death are known as “filibusters”. Both chambers are now able to put an end to filibusters by applying rules which shut off further debate when a specified majority of the members so desire; but in the old days, before these rules were adopted, senators sometimes kept the floor hour after hour all day and all night long, talking on every irrelevant matter, reading long extracts from books, and employing all their ingenuity to lengthen the debate. The proceedings in the Senate are often interesting; but the visitor to the House gallery is likely to be disappointed if he goes with the expectation of hearing some good speech-making. The real work of the House is done in committee.
Classification of congressional powers.
The Powers of Congress.—The powers of Congress, as the lawmaking branch of the national government, are set forth in eighteen clauses of the federal constitution. Hence it is customary to speak of the “eighteen powers of Congress”, although there are in fact more than eighteen separate powers, as anyone will find if he takes the trouble to count them. These powers may be conveniently grouped together under eight heads: (1) financial, the power to levy taxes and to borrow money; (2) commercial, the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states; (3) military, the power to declare war, to raise and support armies, to maintain a navy, and to provide for organizing, arming, and calling forth the state militia; (4) monetary, the power to coin money, to regulate the value thereof, and to protect the currency against counterfeiting; (5) postal, the power to establish post-offices and post roads; (6) judicial, the power to constitute tribunals subordinate to the Supreme Court; (7) miscellaneous, including powers in relation to bankruptcy, naturalization, patents, copyrights, and the government of the national capital; (8) supplementary, the power to make all laws which may be found “necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers”. This is a rather tedious classification of congressional powers, but the section which enumerates these powers is, by all odds, the most important part of the whole constitution and no one can claim to know much about the government of the United States unless he understands, at least in a general way, what these eighteen clauses express and imply.