The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate, its upper house, and the House of Representatives, its lower house. Congress meets in the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Both representatives and senators are chosen through direct election. There are 535 voting Members of Congress (the House of Representatives' membership of 435 plus the Senate membership of 100). Members of the House of Representatives serve two-year terms representing the people of a district. Congressional districts are apportioned to states by population using the United States Census results, each state in the union having at least one representative in the House of Representatives. Regardless of population, each of the 50 states has two senators; the 100 senators each serve a six-year term. The terms are staggered so every two years approximately one-third of the Senate is up for election. Each staggered group of one-third of the senators are called 'classes'. No state of the United States has two senators from the same class. Most incumbents seek re-election, and their historical likelihood of winning subsequent elections exceeds 90 percent. In August 2012, a Gallup poll reported that Congress’s approval rating amongst Americans was at 10%, matching a 38-year low reached in November 2011.
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Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states and/or congress:
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. A Galileo could no more be elected President of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of soft illusion.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
When time is old and hath forgot itself,
When waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy,
And blind oblivion swallowed cities up,
And mighty states characterless are grated
To dusty nothing, yet let memory
From false to false among false maids in love
Upbraid my falsehood.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)