I hope this hasn’t been covered before. I did a search and looked on wikipedia (which acknowledged the situation, but didn’t answer it). As far as I know, both the Senate and the House of Representatives are parts of Congress. So, why when someone says “congressman” or “congresswoman” it automatically means “representative” and not Senator? Wiki even goes so far that it would be a faux pas to call a Senator a “congressperson.” When did this start and why would it only cover one chamber?
This may be helpful.
While the Senators are members of Congress, they are clearly identifiable by the title “Senator.” “Representative” is an awkward five-syllable word, for which “Congressman” furnishes an accurate three-syllable alternative, and has come to be the preferred alternative and specifically referencing a member of the United States House of Representatives.
In some states, like North Carolina, the two houses of the state legislature are also the Senate and the House of Representatives – and the usage “State Senator” and “Representative” reference the guys who make laws in Raleigh, while “Senator” and “Congressman” mean the ones we send to Washington. Using “Congressman” produces a one-word term that defines “member of the lower house of the Federal government’s legislature, as opposed to the state’s.”
Hmm… I checked that link and it serves to frustrate me even more:
“However, there is another explanation. If we used “Congressman” for members of both bodies, we would not be able to immediately identify the Member’s chamber. Using “Senator” or “Representative” differentiates between them.”
Well, yeah, but if you merely use “congressman” to denote “representative” why not just use “representative?” and avoid any confusion possibility at all? I guess I feel like you should be able to use congressman/woman for both. But why or when did “congressman/woman” begin to be used for representatives in the first place.
I’ve always liked the term “Congresscritter”. Avoids all the pesky gender issues.
Damn, I ran into the old “one message per minute” thing. I can’t remember the last time I posted to two different threads in under a minute.
So do the terms “Representative” and “Senator.”
Google is no help. One million one hundred ten thousand cites having zero to do with “Congressman meaning Representative” other than a couple of them saying that the terms are synonomous.
It may derive from the British usage. The House of Lords and the House of Commons are both part of Parliament, but “Member of Parliament” / “M.P.” always mean a member of the Commons, not a Lord.
Hmmm. I wonder if it has to do with the Senate being the “upper house” of Congress. All 535 [del]useless jerkoffs[/del] members of Congress could be described as “congressmen” (or “congresswomen”), but only those elite 100 can call themselves “senators.” So they do. Basically, everybody is using the highest title they can claim.
Actually, you’re right but for exactly the wrong reason. 
At the start, the House rather than the Senate was the more prestigious branch of government. The House was voted on by the people and more truly represented them than a mere pair of politicians cozily selected by friendly legislators.
Senators would quit the Senate to run for the House; Speakers, like Henry Clay and James Polk became presidential candidates; and John Quincy Adams, the only president to seek elective office after leaving the Presidency, served for 17 years in the House.
It wasn’t until after the Civil War that the Senate came to be more prestigious than the House.
I would posit that in the early days the House was Congress, with the Senate a sort of hanger on. Calling your representative your Congressman made eminent sense. You knew who that was, because you had elected him, unlike that faceless guy sent by the legislature. It was only over time that the fewer numbers in the Senate gave each Senator more power and therefore made it a more prestigious office.
Horsehocky. The Senate has always been more prestigious. The members were usually the best members of society, the elite, chosen for their erudite wisdom. House members were the hoi-polloi, chosen because they were the rabble-rousers. See for example the description in Wikipedia, specifically the description of the Antebellum years as the “Golden Age” of the Senate. All the good compromises came out of the Senate, and all the best politicians were senators.
I don’t see why a Senator has to be considered more elite than a Representative. According to wiki:
"Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution sets forth three qualifications for senators: each senator must be at least 30 years old, must have been a citizen of the United States for at least the past nine years, and must be (at the time of the election) an inhabitant of the state he or she seeks to represent.
Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution sets forth three qualifications for representatives: each representative must be at least twenty-five years old, must have been a citizen of the United States for the past seven years, and must be (at the time of the election) an inhabitant of the state they represent."
So, basically, if you are 30 years old and have lived in the U.S. for 9 years you could be a Senator OR a Representative. In other words, it seems to me that you are no more special if you get elected to the Senate than if you were elected to the House of Repesentatives.
Well, there are more Reps than Sens. Fewer available positions = harder to get in = more exclusive = higher status. Would Paris Hilton rather go to a club that admits anyone and everyone, or a club where a big guy named Bruno blocks most of the hopefuls at the door?
The Senate has always been the more prestigious body, both in practice and design. The founding fathers talked about this conceptually and wrote about it in the Federalist papers. But it’s also clear simply from reading the constitution.
The requirements are more stringent for one thing. House candidates must be 25 years old; Senate candidates have to be thirty. Members of the House serve just two years, while the Senators serve six. This has tremendous practical implications, which we probably don’t need to spell out. Also, the Constitution grants many powers to the Senate that aren’t granted to members of the House, including the right to ratify treaties and to approve appointments for cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and Federal judges (including the Supreme Court).
The constitution also says that bills for raising revenue or spending money must originate in the House. However, in practice, while the Senate can not originate such bills, they can create amendments to existing bills and modify them in conference committee.
Also, as others have mentioned, because the Senate has fewer members, each typically wields more individual power. (I think this may be subject to debate in the handful of states that have two senators and one representative, but that’s for another day).
The Speaker of the House ranks second in the line of presidential succesion. I suppose that in theory, this makes that particular House member powerful, although no speaker has ever risen to the office of President, either through succession or subsequent election.
Is a Senate position more prestigious even in states like Vermont or Wyoming?
Edit: I see that anson2995 already raised this question.
The answer would have to be that in the national government individual senator X wields more clout than individual congressman X. Obviously the Speaker of the House and the House majority and minority leaders have substantial clout, but not so much the average one guy among 435.
My sense is that this would carry over into even the low-population states: the Senators, carrying more clout in Washington, would have more prestige at home than the Congressman, even though he’s also elected statewise, because when he gets to Washington, he’s still only one in 435.
James K. Polk served a single term as speaker before becoming governor of Tennessee, then president.
You all need to reconsider the whole “intentions” versus “reality” issue.
The intentions of the Founding Fathers were to put as little actual power and trust in the great mass of the power as possible. The Senate was designed to appoint the best men because the people could not be trusted to do so. The Electoral College was designed under the same principle.
So what.
The reality is that it took decades for the Senate to rise to become the “upper house,” the “most important club in the world,” and all the other horsehocky associated with it. The people did not see it that way.
We’re talking word usage, which relies on reality not intentions. If the people associated their congressman with their representatives, then a hundred Federalist papers – all published before any Congress ever sat – make no difference. When the people voted for Congress, they voted for a Representative and not for a Senator. This is uncontested.
Now please come up with some better argument than Wikipedia, which is useless for nuance, for the relative prestige of the Senate pre-1830.
Okay, I re-examined my own comments and changed my mind. The constitutional differences clearly made the Senate a more powerful body. But the question was about prestige, and Exapno is right – the House was held in higher regard than the Senate prior to the end of the Civil War.
Part of that is due to the fact that senators were appointed (rather than elected) prior to the 17th Amendment. Part of that was due to the fact that the House had more influence over domestic policy, which was more important to the masses than foreign policy. The House was also better organized than the Senate, which meant that while they might have had less power than the Senate, they wielded it more effectively.