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xv The United States of America is the oldest democratic form of government operating under the authority of a single ­ document—a constitution. The American Congress: A Refer- Handbook discusses the first branch of the American ­ence government—the American Congress. The founding fathers of the United States created a new republican form of government that was intended to establish a more powerful and effective government than the one that had been established under the Articles of Confederation. But the founders also distrusted the idea of a central government that could become too powerful or too prone to abuse that power. As this institutional analysis demonstrates, their solution was an elaborate system of gov- ernmental powers that entailed two fundamental principles with respect to governmental power and authority that were ingeniously designed to achieve those two goals: the separation of power into three branches of government and a system of checks and balances incorporated into the separate branches of government intended to limit government by so structuring power that each branch had some constitutionally prescribed powers to offset or check and balance the powers of the other two branches. Article I of the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1789, details the authority, concept, powers, and bicameral structure of the legislative branch of the new republican form of the U.S. gov- ernment. From the founding of the constitutional government until World War I, the American Congress was the more pow- erful of the three branches, and Article I is the longest and most Preface