I've been learning a lot about US politics this year, mostly through discussions on my LiveJournal (and ironic to mention this on a thread originally about the Canadian election...
). Thanks, Roger, for the very useful explanation of the distinction between the House and Senate; I just realised recently while re-watching all of
The West Wing that I honestly had no idea what it was, or whether a Congressman had less status than a Senator.
Postscript to that comment: we have three nominees this year who are senators. Would it be unusual to have a Congressman/woman running for president?
Second comment: I'm still trying to get my head around this notion of attaching 'riders' to bills. That's an aspect of US politics that for a long time just went over my head. In my experience of political systems, bills can be
amended during their passage through parliament, but amendments would have to be 'on topic', as it were. There's no way that anyone could propose an amendment to a bill to, say, increase the minumum wage which would (for example) provide funding for an environmental clean-up project. They're two completely different topics.
So how did this tradition of 'riders' come about, and how long have they been used as ways of getting chunks of money for pet projects that might otherwise not have been funded? And is
The West Wing right when episodes occasionally show riders attached for proposals the president of the day could never support, attached purely as a bargaining tool?
Wendy
