The Legislative Process: The Legislative Process

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The legislative process is easy to dislike, because it generates political posturing and grandstanding, it involves compromise and often leaves broken promises (Smith et al., 2011). Compromises are made all the time, which leaves everyone unhappy. Congress is a system of parties, committees and procedures that were built up over 200 years, which makes it remarkably complex and serves as an obstacle to public understanding (Smith et al., 2011). Bills are often written by multiple committees and laden with technical language and reaching several hundred pages in length (Smith et al., 2011). In addition, Congress is a place that leaves a lot of members uncomfortable with the strong rhetoric and wheeling and dealing that are hallmarks of legislative…show more content…
The founding fathers wanted an executive branch that would prevent tyranny. They wanted him to play a role in politics, but only together with others (Tulis, n.d.). According to the checks and balances, a bill has to be introduced by congress, and signed by the president in order for it to become a law. However, when a president does not agree with the bill, he can veto it, and when this happens the bill has to be reconsidered in congress, and the chance of it passing again becomes almost impossible (Schoolhouse Rock, 2008). This gives one person a lot of power. Adding to this the president is not elected directly by the people, but through the Electoral College. The Founding Fathers wanted the president to be chosen indirectly, because they worried that the dynamic of mass politics would produce poorly qualified presidents (Tulis, n.d.). Therefore they came up with the Electoral College. This means that the president is not directly chosen by the people, but the people vote for electors that then vote for a candidate (Electing a US President in Plain English, 2008) . However, this can be seen as a flaw, because each elector is pledged to vote for a particular candidate, but they can change their vote (How the president of the U.S. is elected, n.d.). So if people in the electoral college decide to vote differently than what they pledged for, the outcome of the election might be very different from the votes cast by Americans. Also, presidents have more constitutional and statutory authority to make foreign policy decisions than domestically (Klunk, 2011). This leads to presidents paying more attention to foreign issues than domestic issues, for example, Bill Clinton showed little interest in foreign policy when he was just elected, but increased his emphasis on international affairs over time (Klunk,
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