Congress has a birthday:

...But it is the same body which, in its first term gave us the energetic and unifying government denied us by the Articles of Confederation...

...Sophia, the first speaker, called it "our poor Congress...

...But the celebration came almost midway between the harassing attack on the pay raise bill stimulated by the media and furthered by an enraged citizenry, and the ill-perceived debate on the confirmation of John Tower for secretary of defense...

...OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy CONGRESS HAS A BIRTHDAY IT'S NEVER TOO LATE FOR REFORM the letter to the Philadelphia Advertiser in 1791 was a tongue-in-cheek description of a "curious conversation" among several women...

...In this debate can be seen the seed of the ultimate division of the electorate into two parties with somewhat different visions of democratic government...

...Not everything the first Congress did was of such Olympian proportions," noted Boggs...

...Its faults are our faults...

...If they attempt a tax on liquor, she said, "they are all hissed," and if they vote for defense, "they are all called pickpockets and cutthroats...

...It is the same body which took the lead in establishing policy for westward expansion with initiatives like the Homestead Act in the early-nineteenth century, and, in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, furthered economic democracy by its policy of regulating financial institutions and business for the good of all...

...Congress needs reform...

...Should it be "His Excellency" or "His Elective Highness" or, as the Senate came to prefer: "His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of the Rights of the Same...

...The Senate, which then met in secret, spent practically its entire first month in debate over what to call the president...

...In addition, it had been accused of self-perpetuation by means of faulty election laws, campaign funding practices, and skewed use of the incumbent's perquisites...

...There was fear that such exalted titles would foster the establishment of a monarchy in the U.S...

...The ceremony, held in the House chamber, was high-spirited and impressive, it is true...

...She listed legislation concerning copyrights and patents, tariffs, support of lighthouses and maritime regulations, an act to preserve the records of government, a naturalization act...

...And it has done so much more...

...During the ratification process many states had demanded constitutional amendments guaranteeing certain liberties...

...The job of that first Congress, said Congresswoman Boggs, was "to take the great document drafted at Philadelphia in 1787 and make it work...

...The celebration of the bicentennial birthday of the Congress did not come at a particularly happy time...

...On the evidence of the 1791 letter, it is clear that the problems faced by each Congress have been, if nothing else, pretty consistent over the last two centuries...

...It drafted the Bill of Rights...

...The congresswoman pointed out, however, that even this debate, which seems ridiculous now, had its serious side...

...Deficits are not new...

...postal regulations, duties on distilled spirits, and of course the funding of the national debt...

...Overall, the first Congress was preoccupied with the national debt created by the Revolutionary War...

...President...

...and threaten the country's development as a republic...

...Congress had also been under attack for such improprieties as accepting gifts and honoraria from sources interested in specific legislation...

...It passed a judiciary act establishing the Supreme Court and the federal court system...

...In a recent speech, Congresswoman Corinne C. (Lindy) Boggs (D-La...

...There was a scholarly and entertaining address by distinguished historian David McCull-ough and a reading by the present poet laureate, Howard Nemerov...

...We should enter into its reform even as we learn more of its history (and ours) in the bicentennial year.centennial year...

...As Howard Nemerov expressed it in his commemorative poem, Congress is the distillation of the two-hundred million and more of us...

...It is not generally known that when the Constitution was adopted, much work was left to be done...

...a member of the Commission on the Bicentenary, pointed out that the first Congress dealt with subjects not unlike those that face the 101st Congress...

...Congress created the executive departments of state, treasury, and war and established the office of attorney general...

...Indeed, one of its distinguished former members had, in a recent book, called for doing away with the bicameral Congress as we know it, and substituting a parliamentary system akin to that of the British...

...The House of Representatives rejected these inflated titles and, thanks to its members, we have always called the president simply, "Mr...

...The executive and judicial branches of the government were only partially described and had to be fleshed out with legislation...

...That letter was clearly a satirical summing up of some of the difficulties the first Congress encountered in making the government described in the Constitution work...

...It is safe to say that the first Congress breathed life into the Constitution and transformed it from a document describing how government should work, to an actual functioning system...

...The conversation continued in that vein and ended with the suggestion that the time had come for women to take over the government since the men could not seem to cope with it successfully...

...Oddly enough, their talk was a sympathetic, if condescending, discussion of the United States Congress...

...She felt that the contending pressures from interest groups would send some of the members of the Congress in question home quite out of their minds...

...This year, on March 4, the present Congress celebrated the 200th birthday of that Congress...

...It also debated the location of the nation's capital...