Joint Session Of The United States Congress
Joint sessions of the United States Congress are the gatherings together of both houses of the United States Congress (the House of Representatives and Senate). Joint sessions are held on special occasions such as the State of the Union Address and presidential inaugurations.
Meetings of Congress for presidential inaugurations are a special case called formal joint gatherings, but may also be joint sessions if both houses are in session at the time.
Joint sessions and meetings are traditionally presided over by the Speaker of the House and take place at the House chamber. However, the Constitution requires the Vice President (as President of the Senate) to preside over the counting of electoral votes.
Read more about Joint Session Of The United States Congress: State of The Union, Counting Electoral Votes, Subjects of Joint Sessions and Meetings, Historic Joint Sessions
Famous quotes containing the words joint, session, united, states and/or congress:
“Your letter of excuses has arrived. I receive the letter but do not admit the excuses except in courtesy, as when a man treads on your toes and begs your pardon—the pardon is granted, but the joint aches, especially if there is a corn upon it.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“I need not tell you of the inadequacy of the American shipping marine on the Pacific Coast.... For this reason it seems to me that there is no subject to which Congress can better devote its attention in the coming session than the passage of a bill which shall encourage our merchant marine in such a way as to establish American lines directly between New York and the eastern ports and South American ports, and both our Pacific Coast ports and the Orient and the Philippines.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“With steady eye on the real issue, let us reinaugurate the good old “central ideas” of the Republic. We can do it. The human heart is with us—God is with us. We shall again be able not to declare, that “all States as States, are equal,” nor yet that “all citizens as citizens are equal,” but to renew the broader, better declaration, including both these and much more, that “all men are created equal.””
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane representatives to Congress for, of late years?... All their speeches put together and boiled down ... do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown on the floor of the Harper’s Ferry engine-house,—that man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other world, though not to represent you there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)