Congress

1. Term length — House 2 years, Senate 6 years. Consequence: House members face constant reelection pressure and respond more quickly to public opinion; senators can take longer-horizon, less popular positions.

2. Constituency — House represents a district (~770,000 people), Senate represents an entire state. Consequence: Senators must build broader, often more ideologically diverse coalitions; House members can specialize in narrower local interests.

3. Debate rules — House debate is tightly limited by the Rules Committee; Senate allows filibuster (effectively requires 60 votes to end debate). Consequence: legislation passes the House on simple majorities (often along party lines) but must clear a 60-vote threshold in the Senate, giving the minority party real veto power and producing more cross-party negotiation.

(Other valid differences: minimum age, distinctive powers like the House originating revenue bills or the Senate confirming nominees and ratifying treaties.)

Filibuster: a Senate procedural tactic in which one or more senators extend debate on a bill (or nomination) indefinitely to delay or block a vote. Originally required actual continuous speaking, today usually just requires the threat.

Cloture: the procedure to END debate and force a vote. Established by Senate Rule XXII in 1917 and amended over time.

Vote required: 60 senators (three-fifths of the chamber) — this is what makes 60 the practical working majority needed to pass most ordinary legislation in the Senate. (Exceptions: budget reconciliation requires only 51, and confirmations were exempted from filibuster — judicial nominees by Democrats in 2013, Supreme Court nominees by Republicans in 2017.)

• Trustee model: legislator uses her own informed judgment, even when it diverges from constituent preferences.
• Delegate model: legislator votes whatever her constituents prefer at the moment.
• Politico model: legislator mixes the two — typically delegates on high-salience issues constituents care about and acts as trustee on technical or low-salience matters.

A senator who votes AGAINST a popular tax cut because of long-term fiscal consequences is acting as a TRUSTEE. She is substituting her own judgment about the public good (or future generations' interests) for the immediate, expressed preferences of her constituents. Edmund Burke's 1774 speech to the electors of Bristol is the classic statement of this view.

When the House and Senate pass DIFFERENT versions of the same bill, leaders typically create a conference committee — a temporary joint committee with members from both chambers, usually drawn from the original substantive committees that handled the bill.

Role of the conference committee:

1. Negotiate a single compromise text reconciling the House and Senate versions.
2. Produce a conference report — the unified bill plus an explanation of differences resolved.
3. Send the conference report back to BOTH chambers for an up-or-down vote (no further amendment allowed).

If both chambers pass the conference report, the unified bill goes to the President for signature or veto. If either chamber rejects the conference report, the bill dies or goes back for another round of negotiation.

Note: in recent years, formal conference committees have become rarer; leaders often negotiate compromises informally and use the amendment trade procedure ("ping-pong") to move identical text between chambers.

(a) Partisan gerrymandering: drawing legislative district lines to maximize the political advantage of the party in control of redistricting — typically by packing the opposing party into a few overwhelmingly safe districts and cracking its remaining voters across many districts in which it can't win. Result: the party drawing the map can win a disproportionate share of seats relative to its statewide vote share.

(b) Court's reasoning (Chief Justice Roberts): Federal courts have no "judicially manageable standard" for deciding when partisan considerations cross from "ordinary" into "unconstitutional excess." How much partisanship is too much? The Constitution's text gives federal courts no answer, and asking judges to second-guess fundamentally political line-drawing decisions is not the kind of question federal courts are equipped to resolve. Therefore the issue is a non-justiciable political question — the Court will not intervene.

(c) Remaining avenues:

1. State courts under state constitutions (which often have more explicit fairness or free-elections clauses). E.g., Pennsylvania and North Carolina state supreme courts have struck down partisan gerrymanders under state law.
2. Independent redistricting commissions established by state law or ballot initiative (as in California, Arizona, Michigan).
3. Federal legislation — Congress could enact uniform redistricting standards (e.g., proposed Freedom to Vote Act). But this faces filibuster and political obstacles.
4. Racial gerrymandering claims (distinct from partisan) remain justiciable in federal court under the Voting Rights Act and Shaw v. Reno (1993), so the line between "partisan" and "racial" remains contested.

Net effect of Rucho: moves the gerrymandering fight from federal courts into state courts and political processes, with very different outcomes across states.