Government 101

Before I go into more complicated things, I should explain the basic structure of U.S. government. There are three fundamental levels: federal, state, and local. The federal government is in charge of the whole country, state governments are concerned with the state, and local governments focus on the city, county, town, or what have you.

The federal government, like state governments, is composed of three branches: executive, judicial, and legislative. The executive branch is headed by the president, or governor for states. It has most of the workers, since most government agencies are derived from cabinet departments. The legislative branch is Congress, or the state legislature. Everyone but Nebraska has two houses, almost always called the House of Representatives and the Senate. The judicial branch has the Supreme Court, twelve circuit courts, and ninety-four district courts. Not all states are organized the same way, of course, but you generally have a few levels of courts, to handle different sizes of cases.

The executive branch is in charge of enforcing the law, which means spending money when needed to pay personnel to inspect goods, pursue criminals, keep an eye on stock transactions, and so forth. The legislative branch makes those laws, which usually have to pass both houses of Congress with a simple majority -- 50% of those voting, plus 1 or rounded up. The judicial branch interprets the law, and can declare any law unconstitutional, in part or in whole.