Members Of The United States Congress
The One Hundred Twelfth United States Congress is the current meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, composed of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. It convened in Washington, D.C. on January 3, 2011, and will end on January 3, 2013, 17 days before the end of the presidential term to which Barack Obama was elected in 2008. Senators elected to regular terms in 2006 will complete those terms in this Congress. This Congress includes the last House of Representatives elected from congressional districts that were apportioned based on the 2000 census.
In the 2010 midterm elections, the Republican Party won the majority in the House of Representatives. While the Democrats kept their Senate majority, it was reduced from the previous Congress. This is the first Congress in which the House and Senate are controlled by different parties since the 107th Congress (2001–2003), and the first Congress to begin that way since the 99th Congress (1985–1987). In this Congress, the House of Representatives has the largest number of Republican members, 242, since the 80th Congress (1947–1949). This is also the first Congress since 1947 in which a member of the Kennedy family has not served, as well as the most politically polarized Congress since Reconstruction, with record low approval ratings.
Read more about Members Of The United States Congress: Major Events, Party Summary, Administrative Officers
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“Sometimes the best way to keep peace in the family is to keep the members of the family apart for awhile.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“What’s the greatest enemy of Christianity to-day? Frozen meat. In the past only members of the upper classes were thoroughly sceptical, despairing, negative. Why? Among other reasons, because they were the only people who could afford to eat too much meat. Now there’s cheap Canterbury lamb and Argentine chilled beef. Even the poor can afford to poison themselves into complete scepticism and despair.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“I esteem it the happiness of this country that its settlers, whilst they were exploring their granted and natural rights and determining the power of the magistrate, were united by personal affection. Members of a church before whose searching covenant all rank was abolished, they stood in awe of each other, as religious men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“The admission of the States of Wyoming and Idaho to the Union are events full of interest and congratulation, not only to the people of those States now happily endowed with a full participation in our privileges and responsibilities, but to all our people. Another belt of States stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)