The U.S. Congress is composed of the bodies known as the Senate and the House of Representatives. The word “senate” comes from the Latin senex, meaning old man — the same root that provides us with the English word senile. The Roman Senate, which the U.S. Senate was in part modeled after, was an aristocratic institution of the heads (literally, patriarchs) of each of the noble families of Rome. The U.S. House of Representatives is meant to be the voice of the common people while the Senate is meant to restrain the “popular passions,” or as James Madison wrote in Federalist 62, that the Senate was necessary to correct “the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies, to yield to the impulses of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions.” The Senate itself, on its own website, agrees that its purpose is to be a “smaller, more deliberative body in the legislative branch to cool the passions and control the urges of the democratic masses.”

We have already discussed the executive branch of the federal government in a prior article. Citizens of the U.S. are told from the time we’re old enough for a civics lesson that this is not only a democracy, but is the democracy, the pattern upon which all modern democracy is based, the model to which all modern democracies should aspire. This series is written with an eye to answering a question: is the United States a democracy? Is the power of the state vested  “in the people,” as our civics teachers say? What does that mean? If the U.S. is a democracy, then a democracy for which class?

The U.S. is a federated bourgeois republic, with two major “layers” of politics: federal and state. Each of these layers has its own “branches” as theorized by Montesquieu in the 1700s (for more on this, refer to our article, The Executive Gambit). The Congress is the legislative “branch” of the federal government, which makes laws and sets budgets. But let us see how exactly the senes, the old men, of Washington and the representatives in the House control the affairs of the U.S. state. Are they, in truth, exercising a power that is ultimately vested in the people, or are they merely the representatives of a moneyed — that is to say bourgeois — class?

The Functions of the Congress

Neither of the houses of Congress begin their work in full session. Rather, the partisan process requires that a bill be introduced to a subcommittee of the House and the same bill be introduced to a subcommittee of the Senate. The composition of these subcommittees is rigorously controlled by agreement between the Democrats and the GOP. That is to say, anyone who is not approved of by one or both of the two sitting bourgeois parties will not sit on a subcommittee and therefore will lack the power to review legislation.

A draft bill must first make it out of the subcommittee, which requires the approval of one or both parties (depending on the current political landscape and the makeup of the subcommittee). From the subcommittee, the bill is moved up to the committee that oversees it. There, it must be forwarded by majority vote to the full body of the House or Senate (depending on which chamber the bill is in). The majority leadership determines the calendar for when a bill is heard in the full session. This means that, if a majority of the party with a majority in the House does not wish to pass a bill, even if a majority of the House members are in favor, the Speaker of the House can simply refuse to bring it to the floor for a vote and let it languish and die. This has been codified as the so-called Hastert Rule. Because a bill must pass both houses of Congress in order to be given to the president to sign, a derailment at the House by the Speaker kills all legislation.

The House has strict rules about speaking on bills… the Senate does not. This means that the Senate can kill a bill exactly like the House does, but rather than through the maneuvering of the Speaker, this is done through the Senate filibuster. Because debate is generally unlimited, the Senate can only bring a bill to vote if the body invokes the rule of cloture. It requires three-fifths of the Senate to vote for cloture to end debate.

The Congress also has the power to impeach and try federal officers, such as the president, as well as to investigate and exercise oversight on the administrative and executive agencies (which were discussed briefly in The Executive Gambit). Although the Congress technically declares war, since the Korean War at the earliest, the executive office has unilaterally decided when the U.S. capitalist empire is at war, even though no formal declaration of war has issued. Declarations of war as a matter of state are passé. This is because the U.S. is in a state of continuous warfare, against all peripheral states. The only question that is left to decide is when and where that simmering war requires the use of open violence.

Congressional Elections

The amount of money involved in Congressional elections is estimated at between $8-10 billion USD for 2020-2022, or half of one percent of the entire gross domestic product of the U.S. in any given year.

Every two years, the entirety of the House (435 seats) is up for re-election. This ensures that House candidates must continuously spend money to stay elected. The average winner of a House seat must spend approximately $2.5 million every 2 years in order to stay in place. Senators, who are elected on a rotating basis with terms of 6 years each, spend on average $26.5 million to maintain their seats. The re-election rate of incumbents in the House is 93.5%, and in the Senate 100%.

In addition, House elections are dominated by political machines. These are disciplined and hierarchical party organizations that operate on patronage at the local level. Political machines control cities and neighborhoods through the patronage system (jobs, grants, etc., in exchange for the mobilization of votes) and through the coordination of campaign efforts. In machine politics, everyone marches in the same direction or they lose ballot access, find their office sidelined, or otherwise drop out of electability. The recent indictment of Eric Adams demonstrates the manner in which a political machine operates. Of course, political machines make a party vulnerable to the “law and order” elements in its opposite party, and the bourgeoisie take great delight in exposing the corruption of their neighbors while shielding their own rotten machinery.

The House is especially susceptible to this process because of the way state-level legislatures are in charge of shaping the Congressional electoral districts. On either side of the aisle, aggressive redistricting has been used to divide up large blocks of population that would vote for the party’s opponents into bite-sized groups that are then lumped together with friendly voters, essentially removing seats from the contest and “granting” them to the party that controls the state. The legislative warfare behind redistricting has been stepped up to a new height in the right-fascist strongholds of the U.S. South.

A System of Cooptation

As we have seen, because of the way the Congress is structured, all “progressive” politicians are co-opted into the fold of the Democratic Party or else find themselves sidelined. Empire-wide organizations exist to help corrupt these politicians and convince them to adopt the legislative agendas supported by these so-called lobbyists. Congresspeople need money for their campaigns. They must be supported by the business interests of their districts. They cannot turn their noses up at party politics for fear of being sidelined and replaced.

The function of the House is thus to absorb radical energy (where it exists) and to break it on the wheel of the subcommittee and the lobbyist campaigner. The show put on when votes are called is merely that; politics are not done in public in Washington, but behind closed doors where the working class is never admitted. All real politics take place at fundraisers and dinners, at donor meetings and lobbying events, at closed party palavers and in the palaces of the ultra-rich. Policy cannot be made in public because the ruling class cannot afford to show the people how its legislative sausage is made.

The mark of a real progressive or, heaven forbid, a Communist, would be that, after election, they stand in the way of all reactionary legislation. Such a politician (one we will never live to see) would use whatever influence they have to expose corruption and back-room dealing from both parties. They would attack the government itself, restrict the expansion of government bureaucracy, choke the state repressive apparatus of funds, and provide relief for the poor and working class while tightening the leash upon the most egregious of the capitalists.

The average age in the U.S. Congress is 58 years old. Over half the members of the Congress are millionaires. 72% of Congresspeople are men — whereas only 49.51% of the population is. 10% of Congress is Black — as against 12% of the U.S. population. 0.9% of the Congress is American Indian — as against 3% of the overall U.S. population. This is the effect of both history and the electoral process, which requires multiple millions of dollars to retain a seat in office. Congressional salaries are set at $174,000, but the expenses required to commute to the capital and live in Washington during Congressional session far outstrip this meager stipend; the cost of living in Washington D.C. is roughly $80,000 a year.

We are told that demographic representation is part of democracy. The ideologists of the bourgeois state (schoolbooks, the talking heads on television, and the political theorists in academia and the media that do their daily lip service to their bourgeois masters) insist that we can have a complete democracy where all demographic categories are represented in the institutions of power. My god, they complain, haven’t we had a Black president? This is meant to show that the injustices of the system are cured and the halls of power are not forbidden to anyone. Even if there were equal representation for women, for Black people, for any of the oppressed nationalities or those suffering from social oppression, in the halls of Congress, their representatives would still be of a different  class, a hostile class.

 The only way to break the stranglehold of these aged white capitalists on U.S. government is to undermine the power of the Congress itself, and eventually replace it with a truly representative institution: a single chamber that is both legislative and executive, which is elected by the working people, and in which each seat is subject to the instantaneous recall of the working people. There is, of course, no road to achieve such a state without the preparation among all the people to confront this corrupt government and do away with it. In short, the only way to sweep clear the encrusted privilege of the old order is to force it out. Until the day we do, we, the people, will always be subservient to they, the bourgeois capitalist class.