Dianne Feinstein, a 76-year-old Jewish democrat, is one of my senators. Since graduating Stanford in 1955, she has gone on to be on the San Francisco board of supervisors, then the mayor. Most recently, she decided not to cosponsor a Stimulus Bill. She did, however, vote for a bill that would close down Guantanamo Bay and change interrogation policies. She also co-sponsored a bill that would allow people to trade in their old cars for money. Senator Feinstein is in her fourth term. Her previous occupation was to be a public official.
My other representative in the Senate is Barbara Boxer, a sixty-nine year old Jewish democrat. An ex-journalist from Brooklyn, NY, Senator Boxer voted opposite of Senator Feinstein, and though she did not cosponsor the bill to close down Guantanamo Bay, and she did not cosponsor the bill about old cars, she did support the recent Stimulus Bill. Senator Boxer is in her third term.
In Congress, my represntative is a fifty-six year-old Protestant from Carona named Ken Calvert, a republican. Before going into politics he graduated from San Diego State University and went on to be involved in the field of business. The only bill he has cosponsored during the nine terms he was in office is the one to ban taxes on unemployment for two years.
What I Learned
I learned that politicians can have very different backgrounds that bring them into politics. Before exploring the website I assumed that all politicians had backgrounds in business or community activism. While this was the case for Calvert and Feinstein, Boxer was a journalist in another state before she managed to become the Senator of California. This makes me realize that politics is a more expansive and accepting field than I previously thought.
Another significant fact that I learned from viewing the website is that Congress must vote on more bills than the Senate. I know this because there were many more bills listed under Ken Calvert than the number of bills listed under Boxer and Feinstein. This would seem to make sense, because there are many more representatives. Having more people means that there are a greater number of bills that are proposed to be voted on. For example, if everyone in the Senate proposed to vote on a bill, that would only be 100 bills, but if everyone in the Congress proposed to vote on a bill, that would be 435 bills, more than four times the amount in the senate.
Something interesting I noticed is the religious breakdown of people in the senate and in the House of Representatives. I was stunned to see how many people in the Congress have religions other than the mainstream ones you hear about most of the time in our society. Most of them are Catholics. That made me wonder, then, why my congressman was a Protestant. It must be because I live in an area with a lot of Protestants. Religion isn’t always what makes people elect officials, since both of our senators are Jewish, and I don’t think most of the people in California are Jewish.
Finally, I was surprised to see the ages of our senators. A seventy-six year old senator does not seem to be in the spirit of California, which feels so much younger in spirit, but that must mean that you do not need to be very young to have a young spirit, since we entrusted her to represent our world views and opinions.
