- [Instructor] Hey, this is Kim from Khan Academy,
and today I'm learning about Article I
of the U.S. Constitution.
Article I is jam packed with information about
how our government is supposed to work,
but principally what it does is create the Legislative
Branch of government, which includes the House of
Representatives, and the Senate, which together,
comprise the Congress of the United States.
Article I also tells us how people can get elected
to those bodies, and what powers Congress has.
To learn more about Article I, I talked to two
Constitutional experts.
Ilya Somin is a professor of law at the Antonin Scalia
Law School at George Mason University, whose research
focuses on Constitutional law, property law,
and the study of popular political participation.
Professor Heather Gerken is the Dean of Yale Law School.
She's a leading expert on Constitution law
and election law, and her research focuses on
Federalism, diversity, and dissent.
- [Dean Gerken] Article I gives an enormous amount
of power to the legislative branch,
otherwise known as Congress,
and it was designed specifically to overcome
some of the problems that they'd seen under
the Articles of Confederation.
- [Professor Somin] The legislative power under
the Articles of Confederation
was pretty weak, in part because the Congress
under the Confederate articles didn't have the authority
to directly tax the states.
They also lacked a lot of other powers that were
eventually given to Congress under the Constitution.
- [Dean Gerken] These were the things that really mattered
if you're building a young nation.
You need to be able to do certain things in order
to protect it, especially at that time, when there
were many, many other countries that were circling
around wanting to grab the land and power.
And so the United States needed to defend itself
in those early days.
- [Kim] Okay, so we all know today that our
Legislative Branch is made up of the Senate
and the House of Representatives.
But it didn't have to be that way, so why was it
that the framers settled on this two house structure
for the Legislative Branch?
- [Professor Somin] I think for several reasons.
One is that it was a compromise between the small states
and the large states.
The large states, ones that have a lot of population,
wanted representation in Congress in accordance with
population, obviously then the large states would get
more representatives.
The small states, on the other hand, were concerned
that they would be dominated by the large states if
that happened, so in the end, the compromise is
you have one house, the House of Representatives,
which is largely apportioned based on population,
and one house, the Senate, which is apportioned
based on each state having two votes, no matter
how small or how large it is.
A second reason why you end up with this structure
is the influence of the British example.
The British had both the House of Commons and the
House of Lords.
And the House of Commons, of course, being more subject
to popular pressure, while the House of Lords were this
elite aristocracy.
And the founders also wanted a combination of popular
and elite power.
And it was thought that the Senate would fill that
elite role, in part, because initially the senators
were chosen by state legislatures, rather than
by the voters directly.
- [Dean Gerken] So the House of Representatives,
which is based on districts, is supposed to represent you
based on where you live, and the Senate, which is based
on states, is supposed to allow, at that time, the state
legislature to nominate two luminaries from the state
to represent the state.
- [Kim] So yeah, for a long time, the senators were
actually appointed.
Now they're elected.
- [Dean Gerken] Senators were appointed until the passage
of the 17th Amendment, which amended Article I, and that
gave state legislatures a fair amount of influence over
who went to the national government.
- [Professor Somin] But it is also true that many states
by that time already effectively had popular election
of senators.
- [Kim] Really interesting.
Okay, so you described the Senate as being kind of the
American version of the House of Lords, a little bit
more elite, a little less subject to popular opinion.
How does that carry over into the Senate that we
have today?
How are its powers different from
the House of Representatives?
- [Professor Somin] It does have certainly different
powers from the House in some respects.
For example, it has the power to ratify treaties
and to confirm appointment to the the Court and to the
president's cabinet, so earlier this year when
Neil Gorsuch was appointed to the Supreme Court,
he had to be confirmed by the Senate.
Obviously today, the Senators are elected just like
members of the House are, and I think they're every
bit as partisan and almost as sensitive to public
opinion as members of the House of Representatives,
so the difference between the Senate and the House
in that regard, maybe it hasn't completely disappeared,
but it's certainly greatly diminished.
- [Kim] Okay so there are certain powers that are
reserved to the Senate.
Are there particular powers that are reserved to
the House of Representatives?
- [Dean Gerken] The House is important.
Don't underestimate the importance of the House.
I'll just say the House of Representatives,
for example, is allowed to initiate impeachment
proceedings against the president.
- [Professor Somin] If the House votes in favor
of impeachment, then the Senate holds a trial
to determine whether the official in question
gets convicted or not.
- [Dean Gerken] As a general matter, though,
they're roughly co-equal.
For the big, important things, like passing legislation,
you need both of them to work together.
- [Kim] So together these two houses make up Congress.
So how is Congress different from the Executive Branch
or the Judicial Branch?
What are its powers?
- [Dean Gerken] The way that the framers understood it
was that each one would have their own job.
So the judiciary, obviously, was there to judge
disputes between people, to run the court system, et cetera.
The executive was there to carry out the laws.
And so the executive's job is to administer the law
once it has been made.
And of course the legislature is there to legislate.
So its main job was to make the law.
And at the time, I will just tell you, everyone thought
that the big gorilla in the room was Congress,
that it would be by far the most powerful organization.
The framers simply did not anticipate how powerful
both the judiciary and the president would become over time.
- [Kim] So what happens if, for example, the Congress
and the president don't get along?
- [Professor Somin] Well, it happens quite a lot.
The president could refuse to accept laws passed by
Congress, he could veto them.
In that event, Congress can only override it if
two-thirds of both the House and the Senate voted
to do so.
Congress, on the other hand, can pressure the president
in various ways.
They can hold hearings investigating his conduct on
various issues.
They can de-fund agencies of the Executive Branch
whose job performance they don't like.
They can refuse to confirm the president's appointees
to various offices, and in extreme cases, that have
happened a couple of times in our history, Congress
can even impeach the president, and if he gets
convicted in the Senate, then he would be removed
from office.
This is what led to the resignation of Richard Nixon.
The House of Representatives impeached him,
and Nixon resigned before he could be tried in the Senate.
President Andrew Johnson and President Bill Clinton
were also both impeached, and in both cases, the Senate
ultimately acquitted them, but it was still a
very painful time for both of those presidents.
- [Kim] So speaking of antagonistic relationships,
I think one thing that's really come to dominate Congress
is partisanship.
To what extent did the Constitution anticipate this
rise of parties and partisanship?
- [Professor Somin] They actually knew about parties
to some degree from their British experience, but they
were very suspicious of them, and they hoped and perhaps
expected that they wouldn't emerge in America to
anything like the same extent that they had in Britain.
But in actual fact, a few years after the adoption
of the Constitution, we already had the first party system,
the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans,
and partisan alignments have played a big role in Congress
ever since then.
- [Dean Gerken] So even back then there were rival
interpretations of how the Constitution
should be carried out, and what kind of power
the national government should wield.
But they somehow thought, naively, I think, that the
parties would disappear and that people would have
allegiances to their state or to their region,
but they wouldn't have allegiance to a party.
That broke down completely almost immediately
after the Constitution was written.
That leads to a real problem these days, because most
modern Constitutions recognize that there will be
two parties, that they will be in competition with
one another, and that part of the job of the
Constitution is to regulate that competition.
- [Professor Somin] Would the founders have done
anything differently if they had known about parties
and expected that they would play such a big role?
It's hard to know for sure, but maybe they would have
been less confident than some of them were that Congress
would always stand up for its prerogatives against
the president when the president and Congress are
of the same party.
I think often Congress is inclined to overlook
various presidential abuses.
- [Kim] If the reverse is true, things might
be very difficult to do.
- [Dean Gerken] Exactly.
I mean the whole point about them needing one another
to act is really a problem if one side is antagonistic
to the other side.
- [Kim] One other thing we see here in Article I,
is talking about kind of what the Federal government does
versus what the states do.
So this is kind of the idea of Federalism, then.
Could you tell us a little bit more, just about what
Federalism is and how it's supposed to work?
- [Dean Gerken] So the way that we understand
Federalism back then, was that there was a division
of labor.
The states would regulate things that were inside
their territories, and accorded to them in terms of
responsibility, and the Federal government would regulate
everything that was accorded to it under the Constitution.
The problem is, as Congress' power became more and more
expansive, it ended up regulating the same areas
that the states regulate.
- [Kim] So if the Federal government and the states
have a law on the same topic, who wins?
- [Dean Gerken] As long as it's passed properly by the
Federal government, then the Federal government wins.
So if there's a Federal law and the state law is
inconsistent with it, the state law is displaced.
- [Kim] Is there anything that might surprise the
framers about how our Congress operates today?
- [Professor Somin] When the framers created
Article I and drafted it, they certainly expected
that Congress would have more power under the
Constitution than it did under the
Articles of Confederation, but I don't think
very many of them would have believed
that Congress would ever be able to do things like
forbid the growth of medical marijuana in your backyard,
or regulate what kind of toilet you're allowed to have
in your house, or for that matter, do something like
the war on drugs, which forbids the possession of drugs
throughout the country, and the like.
Originally the power to regulate interstate commerce,
which is the authority under which most of these things
are done, it was at the time conceived of as a power
for Congress to break down trade barriers between states
and perhaps regulate the actual shipment or trading
goods and services across state lines.
It was not until the 20th century, particularly
after the New Deal, that Congress was able to start
using this as a power to regulate nearly every
aspect of human life that might in some respect
affect the national economy.
So that, I think, is a huge change.
- [Dean Gerken] I think what would really surprise
the framers is how willing Congress has been to
give up its own power.
So Congress has given the president a lot of power,
because it's created administrative agencies
with vaguely defined mandates that therefore allow
the president to use his entire administrative agency
apparatus to pursue his goals.
- [Kim] So we've learned that Article I of the Constitution
establishes the Legislative Branch of the
U.S. government, which is made up of the Senate
and the House of Representatives.
These two bodies were created to balance popular power
with elite power, since members of the House of
Representatives were directly elected by the people,
whereas senators were appointed by state legislatures.
Although one major change is that senators are now
elected as well, what might really surprise the framers
about Congress today is how its power has evolved
over time.
On one hand, as Heather Gerken mentioned, the powers
of the president and the Supreme Court have grown
compared to the powers of Congress, but on the other hand,
as Ilya Somin points out, the framers might be surprised
at just how much of our lives Congress can regulate today.
To learn more about Article I, visit the National
Constitution Center's interactive Constitution,
and Khan Academy's resources on U.S. government
and politics.