In the House, the Member’s (or committee’s) staff edits together the best draft they can from whatever sources have been provided – citizen’s proposals, lobbying groups, model bills, recommendations from committee oversight reports, caucus/legislative conference reports, the platform if there was one, requests from agencies or the President, a book the Member read and liked, a previously failed bill, etc. – then refers that to the Office of Legislative Counsel. Counsel will look it over to see if it is clear what you intend, that you’re using the correct language, that references to chapters and sections and other Acts are correct, etc., and if necessary exchange calls with the staff to clarify – strictly on whether it’s a properly drafted bill and it says what you meant to say. If it is so, or once it’s revised so it is, Counsel puts it in the proper format for filing.
The draft does not itself have to be already a whole bill, though it makes the job far easier and in the case of “administration bills” or bills coming from a group with a well-resourced legal team they will come already preassembled. But sometimes if it’s something straightforward it can just be “this is what we want Subsection 1112.34(b)(1) of Title VII to read like now: [insert text of the relevant subsection], so that it’s clear the tax on domestic grommets ends in 2028” and Counsel will just assemble the proper format and language around it.
The President is in charge of the Executive Branch. I would guess that most Americans don’t have an idea of how vast that branch is.
Shortly: The White House, which includes agencies like the National Security Council; the 15 cabinet agencies; and a variety of other agencies. Though not technically part of the Executive Branch, the President appoints the heads or boards of the so-called independent agencies, like the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Communications Commission.
The total is about a million employees, not counting the three or so million in the Armed Forces.
All of these people are needed to implement the laws passed by Congress. As indicated above, the reality of the laws in practice allow wiggle room. The President, through the Cabinet members and the agency heads, directs which way the wiggle ends up. But sending a wiggle through a million people all over the country is hard to do. The Civil Service in the UK is notoriously resistant to the elected government, so much so that numerous tv shows have satirized the chasm. The Executive Branch is less overtly resistant but simply too large to shift overnight - which is part of what Trump calls the Deep State. Sending an electric jolt through the crowd can move them more quickly, as @Dinsdale’s memo demonstrates.
What a President does, another President can try to undo. Putting new heads and new instructions at the top of the hierarchy is one way. Using Executive Orders to throw a big wiggle into the system sidesteps the Deep State. Maybe sidesteps the actual law, but only the Supreme Court can decide that.
Presidents realized they had a big lever close to hand that they and they alone could pull. No wonder they’re pulling it more and more often.
I would recommend Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk for a good overview of how vast the Executive branch is, how many things it does. You could also browse the Project 2025 document even if you don’t agree with it (you shouldn’t) to see a huge laundry list of all the different agencies the president controls and what they do (and in the minds of some, maybe shouldn’t).
My impression is that the founding fathers were more focussed on regional rather than party politics when they wrote the constitution. Some will argue this was because of the free vs. slave state issue, but there were serious regional differences and one concern was that one region come to dominate the others. The senate was state-size agnostic. In fact, their clever method of determining president and vice-president failed rather spectacularly not long after George Washington retired due to party politics, and the replacement requires the president and vice president to be from separate states.
Anothe point not mentioned - the president can veto a bill (or ignore it) and then the legislative branch can override that veto with a 2/3 majority in each house. As usual this is a rare occasion unless it’s a very interesting issue of contention.
It’s my impression, looking in from the outside here in Canada, that these Executive Orders are for show. The executive branch runs on directives from the president. Presumably, all such decisions on government direction are formalized in directives, meeting notes, notices etc. I’ve only in the last few years seen references to formal “Executive Orders” complete with formal signing ceremonies as a form of publicity stunt to ensure the news that the president, and hence the government, is taking clear and immediate action - is propagated through the media.
Also missing from the discussion above - once a bill is written by a member(s) of congress and assorted ghostwriters (staff, lobbyists, etc.), and the wording vetted by the OLC, I assume the sponsors send it to the relevant committee(s) for consideration. They then vote onwhether send it to the full house for consideration? Perhpas someone has more detail on this. But obviously whether a bill gets through the process to even be considered by congress has a lot more convolutions. One of the powers of the Speaker of the house, as I understand, is his ability to decide what’s on the order paper, what the house will or will not vote on, despite recommendations of the committes?
The referral to committees is made by the Speaker in consultation with the Parliamentarian after the Clerk has recorded the bill as submitted. One can usually know where it will go because the committees and subcommittees have pretty specific jurisdictions, and overlapping content will mean a primary and various secondary committees get to pitch in.
The committee with primary jurisdiction will review and revise if needed and vote on reporting it to the House. Then if the Leadership wants/needs it voted upon, the Rules Committee, dominated by the Speaker’s proxies, has a look at it and calls on anyone who may want further amendments to tell them so they can decide if they will pass it on to the House with recommendation for a special rule or open rule as to what if any further amendments may be voted on, or for the floor leader to move for “suspension” (2/3 vote to approve as-is w/o further discussion).
Mind you, this last part at Rules can happen mere hours before the vote – the Speaker can ramrod it so that nobody has a real chance to propose major changes. OR so major changes he does want can be added without anyone having a chance to do anything but vote straight Y/N.
The House can “discharge” a measure, relieving it from committee and dragging it to the front of the floor queue despite what the Speaker may want, but that is by design hard and cumbersome to do.
Twelfth amendment, 1804. Bunch of stuff attempted to be fixed in there to address a lack of a majority (even Jefferson didn’t get a majority) and stuff about the electoral college. The only vestiges of the 12th that would matter have to do with messy tiebreaking and even much of that was superseded by the 20th amendment.
One bit that definitely remains is the Pres and VP have to reside in different states. Usually, that’s a no-brainer - who wants two New Yorkers, Californians or Floridians?
In 2000 the governor of Texas, George W Bush, appointed the CEO of Halliburton in Dallas, Texas, Dick Cheney, to find him a running mate. Eventually Dick Cheney chose himself, put his house up for sale and “moved” back to Wyoming.
The electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.
So the “two separate states” part was not added by the Twelfth Amendment.
The meaning of that sentence is that no elector can vote for two persons, both of whom are inhabitants of the same state as the elector. That was to try to ensure some regional balance so that a Virginian could not vote for two Virginians.
A Virginian could, however, vote for two Georgians. Neither would been from the same state as himself. This is what the 12th Amendment changed.
That’s certainly a change yet not much of a fix.The 12th is hard to parse so my bad.
If “flaunted it (Article II and 12th)” is too harsh a phrase to use with Bush/Cheney, that still means Texas electors would not have been able to vote for the GOP ticket if it was two Texans. And Cheney’s tactical move was back to Wyoming where he grew up so was kind of plausible. Had he moved to Ohio, Clinton could have called BS on it yet I can’t see how he could executive order anything to do about it.