Which house ratifies treaties

Britain had held such properties in violation of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolution. The Jay Treaty also addressed the issue of trade and negotiated protections for American shipping. Critics argued the treaty made too many concessions to Great Britain and did not fully address the issues of trade and shipping, while supporters emphasized that Jay had reached the best agreement possible at the time. On June 24, , the Senate approved the treaty by the slimmest of margins, bringing the Senate under attack from public and press.

The Senate approved the treaty for ratification on October 20, The territory, which encompassed more than , square miles of land, now makes up fifteen states stretching from Louisiana to Montana. In order to pass legislation and send it to the President for his signature, both the House and the Senate must pass the same bill by majority vote.

If the President vetoes a bill, they may override his veto by passing the bill again in each chamber with at least two-thirds of each body voting in favor. Powers of Congress Congress, as one of the three coequal branches of government, is ascribed significant powers by the Constitution. All legislative power in the government is vested in Congress, meaning that it is the only part of the government that can make new laws or change existing laws. Executive Branch agencies issue regulations with the full force of law, but these are only under the authority of laws enacted by Congress.

The President may veto bills Congress passes, but Congress may also override a veto by a two-thirds vote in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Article I of the Constitution enumerates the powers of Congress and the specific areas in which it may legislate. Congress is also empowered to enact laws deemed "necessary and proper" for the execution of the powers given to any part of the government under the Constitution. Part of Congress's exercise of legislative authority is the establishment of an annual budget for the government.

To this end, Congress levies taxes and tariffs to provide funding for essential government services. If enough money cannot be raised to fund the government, then Congress may also authorize borrowing to make up the difference.

Congress can also mandate spending on specific items: legislatively directed spending, commonly known as "earmarks," specifies funds for a particular project, rather than for a government agency. Non-self-executing treaties require additional legislation before the treaty has such domestic force.

Texas , the Court suggested there may be a presumption against finding treaties self-executing unless the treaty text in which the Senate concurred clearly indicated its self-executing status.

The remainder of Paragraphs 2 and 3 of Article II deals with the subject of official appointments. With regard to diplomatic officials, judges and other officers of the United States, Article II lays out four modes of appointment.

Olson Buckley v. Chadha , may implicitly have given the Buckley formulation more substance. Distinguishing inferior from principal officers has also sometimes proved puzzling. Morrison v. United States Perhaps the greatest source of controversy regarding the Appointments Clause, however, surrounds its implications, if any, for the removal of federal officers. United States , and, indeed, may not reserve for itself any direct role in the removal of officers other than through impeachment, Bowsher v.

Synar The Court has since held, in that vein, that officers of the United States may not be shielded from presidential removal by multiple layers of restrictions on removal. Thus, inferior officers appointed by heads of departments who are not themselves removable at will by the President must be removable at will by the officers who appoint them.

Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Co. Accounting Oversight Board The Recess Appointments Clause was included in Article II in the apparent anticipation that government must operate year-round, but Congress would typically be away from the capital for months at a time.

Over the ensuing decades—and extending to modern times when Congress itself sits nearly year-round—the somewhat awkward wording of the Clause seemed to pose two issues that the Supreme Court decided for the first time in First, does the power of recess appointments extend to vacancies that initially occurred while the Senate was not in recess? As a result, in the particular case, the Court ruled against the President, because the relevant recess was too short.

NLRB v. Noel Canning Article II of the U. Constitution is plainly critical to establishing two fundamental institutional relationships: the President's relationship with Congress and the President's relationship to the remainder of the executive establishment, which we would now call "the bureaucracy.

To paraphrase Justice Robert Jackson, Americans may "be surprised at the poverty of really useful and unambiguous authority applicable to concrete problems of executive power as they actually present themselves. Sawyer With regard to the legislative-executive relationship, the Washington Administration set institutional precedents that have been followed with such consistency over the centuries that they now dominate our understanding of Article II.

To the uninitiated reader, the Treaty Clause might be thought to imply that treaties represent the sole permissible instrument for formalizing the nation's international obligations, or that the Senate, because of its "advice and consent" role, would be a full partner with presidents in the negotiation of treaties.

Neither is the case. The Washington and Adams Administrations used executive agreements, without Senate consent, both in arranging for the international delivery of mail and in settling claims arising from the seizure of a U. Such agreements, sometimes pursued unilaterally and sometimes with statutory authority, now far outnumber treaties as instruments of international commitment. As for actual treaties, when the Senate failed to provide Washington prompt advice concerning the negotiation of peace between Georgia and the Creek Indians, he established the now-uniform practice of presenting to the Senate for its consent only treaties that have already been completed.

The first Congress and the Washington Administration also began filling in some of the constitutional silences regarding their respective powers. Congress first asserted its unstated power to investigate the executive branch by establishing a special committee to look into the bloody defeat of the U. Army by a confederation of Indian tribes in the Northwest Territory. Washington, for his part, provided the committee with those executive branch documents it sought to inform its investigation, but only after determining with his cabinet that the disclosure decision was discretionary on his part and that presidents might constitutionally withhold information that ought, in the public interest, not be disclosed.

He later implemented his view by withholding from the House of Representatives documents it sought in connection with negotiations over the Jay Treaty. This laid a foundation for future claims of executive privilege, a phrase nowhere found in Article II. Text, even aided by history, however, shines less light on constitutional requirements for the President's relationship to those other instrumentalities of government that Congress creates but which are not part of the federal judiciary -- that is, to the plethora of "departments," "agencies," "administrations," "boards," and "commissions" comprised within the executive branch.

Recent decades have seen much ardent advocacy on behalf of the so- called "unitary executive" idea -- specifically, the view that Article II, by vesting law execution power in the President, forbids Congress from extending any such authority to individuals or entities not subject to presidential control.

Adherents to this unitary executive reading of Article II insist that the Constitution guarantees the President plenary powers, which Congress may not limit, both to discharge unelected executive administrators at will and to direct how those officials shall exercise any and all discretionary authority that they possess under law.

To take but one quotidian example, a Justice Department opinion from the Reagan Administration argued that a statute requiring the Director of the Centers for Disease Control to arrange for the mass mailing of AIDS information fliers, free from any executive branch supervision, violated separation of powers by "unconstitutionally infringing upon the President's authority to supervise the executive branch. Legal Counsel 47 With regard to most of what the executive branch does -- namely, implementing domestic statutes with no close connection to foreign affairs or military command -- this interpretation is not persuasive.

Independently or all together, these clauses are thought to create two constitutional imperatives. The first is that the President is entitled to execute the laws personally and may take upon himself or herself the prerogative of making any administrative decision that Congress has assigned to any officer within the executive branch.

The second is that the President is entitled to remove at will any officer of the United States who serves in the executive branch. The first problem with this interpretation is that the relevant clauses viewed either independently or together did not originally have the semantic implications that unitary executive theorists imagine. These kinds of clauses were prevalent in early state constitutions that also established relationships between governors, as chief executives of the states, and state agencies.

Rather than giving governors unitary executive control over state administration, they nearly all split supervision of the bureaucracy among the different branches of government -- the governor, the legislature, and, in some states, the courts.

Originalist defenders of a unitary executive reading of the federal Constitution often dismiss the interpretive significance of pre state constitutions on the ground that these early texts paid only lip service to separation of powers principles, while presenting the Framers chiefly with examples of government structure to avoid. The problem with this stance is that state constitutions written in the first decades after persisted in using the same clauses, by that time found also in Article II, to describe state governments in which governors continued to lack unitary control.