United States Senate

The Senate is the upper house of Congress. It consists of 100 members, two people from each of the 50 states. The service life of each elected senator is 6 years. Once every two years, one-third of the senators are reelected. Every citizen who has reached the age of 30 and resides in the state for at least 9 years may apply for a place in the US Senate.

Decision making in the Senate takes place by voting. Each of the senators has one vote, the decision is considered to be taken when recruiting a simple majority of these votes. The US Senate is chaired by the country’s vice president, but his participation in voting is limited only to those cases where the votes of the senators are equally divided. Currently, there are 57 representatives of the Democratic Party, 41 representatives of the Republican Party and 2 senators in the United States Senate, acting independently of the two main parties in the country. However, these two independent members of the US Senate are in favor of the majority of the Democratic Party.

The importance of the Senate in the work of the state machinery of the United States of America needs to be assessed taking into account several aspects.

• First of all, the Senate helps to provide the equal representation of each of the subjects of the federation in the supreme bodies of power. Each state presents two senators who have the same weight in voting for certain decisions. This is of great importance for small states, since their interests in the lower house of parliament, whose members are recruited according to the number of inhabitants in a particular territory, are insignificant;
• Secondly, US Senate plays a big role in making state decisions because its members are older than those who work in the House of Representatives; they are elected for a longer term and renewed by one third every two years. This allows the upper house of parliament of the United States of America to act as a kind of brake on the decisions made by the more democratic principles and the House of Representatives, which has a significant populist attitude. In this case, the senators are more oriented towards the government of the country and can conduct a more qualitative examination of all adopted bills.

Note: until 1913, senators were not chosen by US citizens but by members of specially formed legislative assemblies of each of the states. However, after the adoption of the 17th amendment to the constitution, the Senate of the United States began to be formed by direct elections.

Category: General Issues

Tags: senate, united states