United States Congress

The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States of America, consisting of two houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Both senators and representatives are chosen through direct election.

Sourced

• Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens. And when he sits down, everybody disagrees.
  • Attributed to Russian actor Boris Marshalov after visiting the House of Representatives
    • Fuller, Edmund (1942). Thesaurus of Anecdotes. Crown Publishers. p. 343. 
    • Young, Roland (1943). This Is Congress. A. A. Knopf. p. 158. 
  • Attributed to Will Rogers
    • Time–Life Books (1969). This Fabulous Century: 1910–1920. Time–Life. p. 263. 

• I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.
  • Mark Twain, reported in Caroline Thomas Harnsberger, Mark Twain at Your Fingertips‎ (1948), p. 364.

• Suppose you were a member of Congress. And suppose you were an idiot. But I repeat myself.
  • Mark Twain, draft manuscript (c.1881), quoted by Albert Bigelow Paine in Mark Twain: A Biography (1912).

• Since pro means the opposite of con, can you give me an illustration? Progress and Congress.
  • Origin unknown, but reported in Louis Untermeyer, A Treasury of Laughter (1946), p. 655. Variously reported in other phrasings, such as, "If pro is the opposite of con, then isn't progress the opposite of congress?"

• Congress is, after all, not a body of laymen unfamiliar with the commonplaces of our law. This legislation was the formulation of the two Judiciary Committees, all of whom are lawyers, and the Congress is predominately a lawyers' body.
  • Felix Frankfurter, Callanan v. United States, 364 U.S. 587, 594 (1961).

• I could study all my life and not think up half the amount of funny things they can think of in one Session of Congress.
  • Will Rogers, in Will Rogers' Weekly Articles: The Coolidge Years, 1925-1927‎ (1981), p. 8.

• So when all the yielding and objections is over, the other Senator said, "I object to the remarks of a professional joker being put into the Congressional Record." Taking a dig at me, see? They didn't want any outside fellow contributing. Well, he had me wrong. Compared to them I'm an amateur, and the thing about my jokes is that they don't hurt anybody. You can say they're not funny or they're terrible or they're good or whatever it is, but they don't do no harm. But with Congress — every time they make a joke it's a law. And every time they make a law it's a joke.
  • Will Rogers, quoted in P. J. O'Brien, Will Rogers, Ambassador of Good Will, Prince of Wit and Wisdom, 1935, ch. 9, pp. 156–57 [1]

• Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time. Even when the problems it ignores build up to crises and erupt in strikes, riots, and demonstrations, it has not moved. Its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission.
  • Shirley Chisholm, Unbought and Unbossed‎ (1970), p. 104.