Article 1, Section 4, Clause 2: Sessions of Congress

The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by Law appoint a different Day.

This clause seems uncontroversial and its significance may escape many modern American readers. It is nonetheless quite important. It establishes that Congress has the power to call itself into session, and is in fact obligated to do so yearly.  Congress is not called into session only by the President (though he does have power to call Congress into special session to deal with crises.) This is in contrast with many foreign parliaments, which are formally called into session only by the monarch.

There was apparently no serious debate at the Constitutional Convention over giving Congress the power to call itself into session. However, there was disagreement about a requirement for annual meetings. Several delegates opposed this, on the grounds that a Congress with limited and enumerated powers should not necessarily need to meet so often.  (This is in striking contrast with the modern perception of a Congress continuously in session, “doing the nation’s business”, a concept we find abhorrent.) Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts successfully argued that Congress needed to meet at least annually as a check on the power of the President, who would be continuously exercising his powers of office.

The meeting date proved awkward, and the 20th Amendment changed it to noon on the third day of January, though without revoking the power of Congress to select a different day by law. This had the practical effect of eliminating “lame duck” Congresses between early December and the 4th of March, the day on which the first Congress was sworn in, which established a precedent for future Congresses  until passage of the amendment. However, Congress retained the power to call itself into session.

Since we have now addressed the meat of the clause, let us pause and digress slightly. We would not wish to live under the British constitution, which we consider inferior to our own in several important respects. Nevertheless, we cannot say that British constitution has not been successful, and there are lessons to be learned, positive as well as negative, from the British experience, as the Framers did in their time. Many of the most objectionable aspects of the British constitution, such as the monarchy itself, have effectively been reduced to ceremonial status and so rendered mostly harmless. The power of the British monarch to call Parliament into session is one of these; in reality, in the modern world, the monarch calls Parliament into session whenever Parliament wishes to be called into session, or else on advice of ministers. Still, there is much to be said for writing such things down in a legal document acknowledged to be the supreme law of the land.

If we were asked to make just one substantial critique of the British constitution, it would be to object to the supremacy of the House of Commons, which makes Britain significantly more vulnerable to simple government than our own bicameral Congress. We attribute the more extreme oscillations of British policy to this unhappy fact. Fortunately for Her Majesty’s subjects, the House of Lords, which more closely resembles our Supreme Court than a legislative body, provides a significant check on this tendency.