Introduction
The United States Congress is a body that is responsible for the creation and passing of laws shaping the legal system of the country. The Congressional committees are an essential part of the U.S. Congress since they perform many important roles. The work of committees involves identifying the existing issues and devising legal methods to address them in a way that benefits all members of society.
Discussion
The congressional committees possess a considerable level of power which can be explained by the importance of the functions which they have. Essentially, the committees have large volumes of work with varying degrees of complexity, and to be successful, the committees need to have powers. For instance, the committees can request comments from the executive agencies, which is essential when drafting new legislation (Berry & Fowler, 2018). Not all committee members possess the highest level of knowledge on every issue which they analyze during legislative review. Therefore, the committees must have the power to conduct additional information gathering and request non-committee experts to provide their perspectives on the questions at hand. Outside specialists can bring the required expertise, which is why committees should have the option to ask them about their respective areas of competence (Francis & Bramlett, 2017). Thus, the committees of the United States Congress are powerful because they must manage numerous difficult issues and, to effectively deliver on their responsibilities, need to have considerable capacities.
The committees consist of the people who are appointed to them and thus need to work together to produce positive results and agree upon certain measures collectively. The question of who becomes appointed to the committees is a crucial one because committee seats enable members to extract certain benefits for their parties and constituents. Every party tends to have an agenda and a set of policies that it plans on implementing. When members of parties become appointed to congressional committees, they receive an actual opportunity to advance their policies and persuade other committee members to support their initiatives (Gaines et al., 2019). Essentially, committee members have more influence, as opposed to those congress members who do not have a seat on committees. Moreover, since congress members represent their constituents’ interests, they can also lobby them. As a result, the members appointed to committees can, for instance, attempt to allocate more funding to their respective states.
The House Appropriations Committee does not provide a good representation of all House committees because it has many distinctive features. First of all, the members of the Appropriations Committee tend not to serve on any other committee, unlike the congressmen and congresswomen appointed to the rest of the committees (Reynolds, 2019). Additionally, the House Appropriations Committee has the so-called power of the purse since it is responsible for the appropriation of funding for the majority of the federal government’s functions. Such an obligation makes the Appropriations Committee one of the most powerful ones in the entire Congress. Moreover, the committee has one of the highest numbers of subcommittees which it comprises, namely, twelve, and each of them exercises jurisdiction over its part of the federal government. Thus, the Appropriations Committee cannot serve as an example for all committees because it has exceptional power.
Conclusion
The committees of the U.S. Congress facilitate the legislative process monitor the governmental operations, determine the issues requiring review, and collect important information. The congressional committees possess a considerable amount of power because they need to manage large volumes of complex work, which requires them to interact with different social and political stakeholders. The appointment to committees, especially those such as the House Appropriations Committee, provides congress members with opportunities to advance their initiatives.
References
Berry, C. R., & Fowler, A. (2018). Congressional committees, legislative influence, and the hegemony of chairs.Journal of Public Economics, 158, 1–11.
Francis, K., &, Bramlett, B. (2017). Precongressional careers and committees: The impact of congruence. American Politics Research, 45(5), 755–789.
Gaines, B. J., Goodwin, M., Bates, S. H., & Sin, G. (2019). The study of legislative committees. The Journal of Legislative Studies, 25(3), 331–339.
Reynolds, M. (2019) The personal or the partisan? The politics of House Appropriations amendments, 1985-2016. Congress & the Presidency, 46(1), 28–59.