Congressional BEHAVIOR [AP Gov Review, Unit 2 Topic 3 (2.3)]

hey there and welcome back to heimlich's history now we've been going through unit two of the ap government curriculum and in this video we're gonna look at what factors affect how well congress is able to get its job done so if you're ready to get them brain gals milked well then let's get to it so in this video here's what we're trying to do explain how congressional behavior is influenced by election processes partisanship and divided government so in the last two videos we've looked at the mechanisms congress uses to do its job like leadership structures

and enumerated powers etc and that's how it works in a perfect world but this is not in fact a perfect world and so we need to look at a few factors that can either facilitate the process of law making or slow it down the first factor affecting how well congress can do its job is ideological division now we'll talk more about ideology in the next unit but for now just understand that liberals and conservatives represent two different ideologies or sets of assumptions and principles and over the last 30 years we've seen a very clear trend

where republicans have over time become more conservative and democrats have become more liberal and that polarization has serious implications like the further from the middle each one gets the less their ideas about what is good for the nation overlap the result is that it becomes very difficult for them to negotiate and compromise which is what our system of government requires bills come up and instead of healthy debate we get policy gridlock and partisan fighting and that can really impede the process of getting laws passed and so in an environment like this the best way to

get work done quickly is to have the same party as the majority in both the house and the senate that way they can always pass legislation which aligns with their ideology without having to consider the ideological position of the minority party for example this is how fdr got so many of his new deal programs passed in his first hundred days of office in more recent times this is how president obama got his health care plan passed over republican objections so when one party dominates both houses of congress things get done quick fast and in a

hurry the opposite of that reality is a divided government in which opposing parties hold majorities in both houses or when the president is from one party and congress has a majority from the opposing party and that as you can imagine slows things down significantly and let me give you an example of both realities that i just mentioned in 2016 president obama had the chance to appoint a new supreme court justice now 2016 happened to be the last year of his eight-year term and so obama was not up for re-election and the word we use for

a president in that situation is a lame-duck president because since there's no chance he was going to be president again congress didn't have much incentive to work with him on his agenda items anyway supreme court justice antonin scalia died during obama's lame duck stretch but hey he's still the president and still has the constitutional responsibility to appoint a new justice and he did so and of course he made the appointment in accordance with his own liberal ideology the problem is that we had a divided government the senate whose job it is to confirm presidential appointments

held a republican majority and so senate majority leader mitch mcconnell said that it wasn't good form to allow a president to appoint a justice in the final months of his tenure since we're about to get a new president and so the senate refused to hold confirmation hearings and that is an example of things getting bogged down because of a divided government but what's interesting is that four years later in 2020 it was another election year and this time republican donald trump had the opportunity to appoint a new justice in the waning months of his presidency

and the republicans still held a majority in the senate instead of adhering to the principle that they laid down with obama namely that it's not good form to appoint a new justice in an election year they moved heaven and earth to hold confirmation hearings for a conservative justice to be put on the bench now whatever you think about that is irrelevant for our purposes it just matters that you can see how a government dominated by one party can speed up the work of congress now another factor that affects how congress gets this work done is

the way representatives understand their role and there are basically three ways that they can think about it first they can conform to the delegate model of representation in this model the representative believes he or she must vote with the will of the people even if it goes against the representative's own judgment the delegate believes that he or she is there to represent the people's beliefs and desires not their own you especially see this model in the house because every two years they have to answer to the people in another election now representatives can also adhere

to the trustee model of representation the idea here is that the representative believes he or she has been entrusted with the people's faith and therefore must vote according to his or her own conscience so a trustee can actually vote against the will of the people if he or she believes it to be the right thing to do a great example of this happened during the impeachment hearings of donald trump republican senator mitt romney voted for trump's removal from office even though the majority of his utah constituency did not support that vote and the third model

of representation is the politico model which is essentially a hybrid of the other two the politico will act like a delegate when it's clear that his or her constituents feel strongly about an issue but if not the politico will act more like a trustee okay the last topic we need to consider with respect to how efficient congress does its work is the issue of redistricting remember that every 10 years based on the information gathered by the census congressional districts are redrawn to reflect the most current population numbers and this can be a highly contentious issue

and things can get even crazier when districts are not reapportioned properly and i reckon we ought to talk about one of your supreme court cases that addresses this namely baker versus carr in 1962. now i have a whole video on this case that goes into a lot more depth but here it's enough to know that in tennessee the work of redrawing districts had not been done properly and that meant that rural voters had a lot more voting power than urban residents the argument here was that such a situation violated the equal protection clause of the

14th amendment and the court agreed that it did so out of this case you get the one-person one-vote principle meaning that redistricting had to be done in such a way that every person's vote was equally powerful and then we have another required case which addressed redistricting but before we talk about it i need to introduce you to a term that you'll need to know namely gerrymandering the idea here is that districts are drawn in such a way to benefit one party or group over another maybe you're confused as to what i'm talking about so let

me explain it up real nice for you suppose you have 50 people divided into five districts and 40 percent of republicans and 60 are democrats if you draw the districts like this democrats will always win these three districts and republicans will always win these two districts but if you draw the districts like this democrats will win in every district either way more districts will be voting democrat than republican but suppose some wily republican draws the districts like this then look what happens republicans will hold majorities in three of the districts and now democrats only have

two so that's what we call partisan gerrymandering where districts are redrawn to favor one party over another but our next required case deals with racial gerrymandering so in shaw versus reno two north carolina districts were drawn in very weird shapes in order to create majority black districts now to be fair north carolina was only doing what the justice department told them to do on account of the voting rights act of 1965. so even though these districts were drawn in order to boost the power of the black vote the court ruled that drawing districts solely based

on race was a dangerous practice that could on other occasions be used to disenfranchise minority voters and thus such a practice was deemed unconstitutional so the point of everything i've just said is this the factors that affect how well congress is able to do their job include ideological division or alignment whether representatives understand themselves as trustees delegates or politicos and the process of redistricting and gerrymandering okay if you want help getting an a in your class and five on your exam and may then click right here and grab review packet i got more videos on

unit two right here and if you want me to keep making these then by all means subscribe and i shall oblige heimler out