Congress - AP Government and Politics

The Cloture Rule is designed to combat the occasional use of a filibuster in Congress. A filibuster is when one individual speaks indefinitely, but according to congressional procedure, with the intention of preventing Congress from debating or passing a bill. The Cloture Rule stated that, with a two-thirds majority (now three-fifths) vote of Congress, a filibuster can be ended and the debate quickly terminated.

A discharge petition is a means by which the House can vote to remove a Bill from a committee and bring it to the House Floor for discussion. It requires an absolute majority to be utilized, and so is rarely done successfully.

In Congressional procedure it is quite common for one group to try to add an unrelated amendment to a bill that seems likely to garner a lot of support. The usual goal is to try to pass a controversial or unpopular measure by hiding it in a much larger bill about something unrelated. This amendment is called a “rider.”

The ability of a Member of Congress to mail a letter to a member of their constituency, without having to pay for the service, is called Franking Privilege. It is designed, at least in theory, to encourage increased interaction between a representative and those that they represent.

A Select Committee is a temporary committee created with a prescribed purpose, usually to investigate one particular issue, and is then disbanded once that issue has been dealt with.

A Quorum is the minimum number of representatives required to be present in a government body in order to carry official business. A Quorum Call then is a roll call designed to see if the minimum number of representatives are present.

The constitution of the United States explicitly lays out bill procedure. A bill is first introduced into the House. Once it is approved there, it goes to the Senate. Then a committee of members from both the House and the Senate meet to hammer out differences in the bill before it is sent to the President to be signed or vetoed.

The constitution stipulates that budget bills are produced in the House of Representatives. The Congressional Budget Office advises and produces statistics for Congress and the Internal Revenue Service is in charge of collecting taxes.

The Vice President, despite not being a senator, serves as the President of the Senate. In their absence, the president pro-tempore takes over to run the Senate.

The Speaker of the House serves as the leader of the House of Representatives. Whichever member of Congress that serves as the Speaker runs the congressional meetings and votes that take place.

The Senate must vote to remove the President from office by a vote. Remember that impeachment is a two-step process. First the House draws up "Articles of Impeachment"--essentially a discussion of what the President did wrong and why he deserves to be impeached. The Article(s) must pass by a simple majority vote.

At that point, the Articles are kicked over to the Senate which essentially puts the President on trial over the substance of the Articles. Afterwards, the Senate must vote to remove the President from office, and the measure must pass by a vote.

All of the other answers are incorrect because they either involve the wrong chamber, or the wrong fraction, or both.

The right to vote to impeach officials is reserved for the House of Representatives, but it is the Senate that has the power to try the officials that the House of Representatives votes to impeach.

The Senate procedure to end a filibuster, which requires a three-fifths vote in the Senate, is called the Cloture Rule. It originally required a two-thirds vote in the Senate, but this proved too difficult to attain, so the limit was lowered to three-fifths.

This question is relatively straightforward, although it requires knowledge of the difference between original and appellate jurisdiction. An easy way to keep the two apart is to look at the roots and/or cognates of the two words: the root of “original,” for example, means “the beginning, or source”; the root of “appellate” is “appeal,” a technical term in law to mean the application to a higher court to reverse a lower. Thus, “original” jurisdiction must mean that the case BEGAN in that court; the questions are those of fact (e.g. did Viola Davis kill her husband in “How to Get Away with Murder”). “Appellate” jurisdiction, then, must mean that one of the parties (the losing party) disagrees with the decision of the lower court, and seeks to have it reversed—thus they appeal to a higher court. Appellate courts generally deal with questions of law, rather than those of fact. In other words, appellate courts (generally) do NOT deal with “did Viola Davis kill her husband”—the lower court does. They do, however, answer questions such as “did the lower court apply the applicable law correctly,” etc.

Now, the Supreme Court is odd in the sense that it has both original AND appellate jurisdiction; that is, it can act as both a trial court AND a court of appeals (to put it yet another way, it can answer questions of fact AND questions of law). That said, the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction is fixed in the Constitution (Remember Marbury v. Madison? That is, essentially, the reason Marbury lost). So, can Congress expand or restrict the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction willy-nilly? No. That requires a constitutional amendment (remember: the only way to change the constitution is with an amendment).

The Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction, however, is subject to the whim of Congress—Congress can add to or subtract from (or even remove) the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction simply by passing a bill (provided the President signs it, of course).

The filibuster is often called “talking a bill to death,” and it is available only to senators (at the Congressional level—several states do have the filibuster). Essentially, once a senator obtains the floor (is recognized and allowed to speak), he may then speak as long as he wants, as the Senate rules provide for “unlimited debate.”

Here’s the fun part: the “debate” need not actually be about the bill at hand. Take, for example, Strom Thurmond, a senator from South Carolina who (although now deceased) still holds the record for the longest filibuster in the history of the country: 24 hours and 18 minutes. Thurmond was filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and during his time on the floor, read from the bible, the phone book, and a recipe or two.

The House of Representatives does not allow for unlimited debate (in fact, the House Rules require limited debate), thus there is no filibuster in the House. The President doesn’t filibuster because his part in the legislative process is to either sign the bill into law or veto it.

Cloture is the rule that provides for the forcible end of a filibuster, so long as of the Senate vote to end it. Given that the filibuster is only available in the Senate, all of the other answers must be incorrect.

As a somewhat interesting technical note, it is devastatingly difficult to end a filibuster; most bills pass (really either chamber) by a bare majority, so getting on board for a cloture vote is often quite hard.

This is a tough question. To begin with, students often struggle with grants-in-aid in general because of how foreign the concept is. That said, as long as you remember the two (you likely only studied two) types of grants-in-aid, you should be fine—the names give you the answer. To wit, a “block” grant sounds pretty general, right? That’s because it is.

Let’s hash this out a bit further. When the federal government gives money to states or local governments in a block grant (which, by the way, is fairly rare), the money comes with strings, but relatively few of them. In other words, the federal government sketches out a policy target, but leaves the states or local government to fill in the details—it’s like being told you’re going to receive a block of cheese with which you must make a meal. Nobody tells you exactly how (that is, in what manner) you have to use the cheese—you can dice it, shred it, slice it, etc, but as long as you use it to make a meal, you’ve fulfilled the target policy. Make sense?

Let’s bring this a little closer to home with a more relevant example. Imagine that the federal government gave $1,000,000 to Fargo, North Dakota, with the policy target of “education.” Without further instruction or insight (and there likely wouldn’t be—it is a block grant, after all), the school board in Fargo could use the money for a new playground, new school computers, new lunch trays, carpet, paint, etc (hopefully you get the picture), as long as it had to do with education.

Although one could make an argument that both ‘editing’ and ‘drafting’ are correct—or at least, not wrong—‘mark up’ is the correct answer. Mark up is actually a term of art within Congress, and it refers to the work that a committee (or subcommittee) performs on a bill; it can be anything from simple editorial comments (grammatical corrections, for example) to very substantive changes to a bill.

This is a tough question. Regardless, a categorical grant is basically the opposite of a block grant—it is highly specific and oftentimes even includes the procedures that the implementing authority must use. Again, look at the name. “Categorical” sounds a lot more specific than “block”—because it is!

To extend our Fargo, ND school analogy: with a categorical grant, the federal government likely would specify, say, a particular education target (like books), within a certain timeframe, etc. Hopefully the difference between categorical and block is slightly more apparent now.