This is a tough question. To begin with, students often struggle with grants-in-aid in general because of how foreign the concept is. That said, as long as you remember the two (you likely only studied two) types of grants-in-aid, you should be fine—the names give you the answer. To wit, a “block” grant sounds pretty general, right? That’s because it is.

Let’s hash this out a bit further. When the federal government gives money to states or local governments in a block grant (which, by the way, is fairly rare), the money comes with strings, but relatively few of them. In other words, the federal government sketches out a policy target, but leaves the states or local government to fill in the details—it’s like being told you’re going to receive a block of cheese with which you must make a meal. Nobody tells you exactly how (that is, in what manner) you have to use the cheese—you can dice it, shred it, slice it, etc, but as long as you use it to make a meal, you’ve fulfilled the target policy. Make sense?

Let’s bring this a little closer to home with a more relevant example. Imagine that the federal government gave $1,000,000 to Fargo, North Dakota, with the policy target of “education.” Without further instruction or insight (and there likely wouldn’t be—it is a block grant, after all), the school board in Fargo could use the money for a new playground, new school computers, new lunch trays, carpet, paint, etc (hopefully you get the picture), as long as it had to do with education.

While government expenditures have indeed increased in recent times, it is also true that, due to widespread public concerns occasioned by this development, the national budget has grown ever narrower in terms of its generosity. More and more government departments are faced with funding cutbacks and are urged to spend what money they do receive more responsibly and transparently, with dire consequences for failure. Congressional leadership in both chambers strives to ensure that government monies are spent in the wisest way possible, often moving to de-fund some pork barrels and other programs deemed of dubious necessity. As zealous to guard their chances of reelection as ever, greater numbers of Senators and representatives have thus become engaged in oversight activities in hopes of both preserving pork funds for their constituents and so they can point to their role in curbing government spending come reelection time.

The constitution of the United States explicitly lays out bill procedure. A bill is first introduced into the House. Once it is approved there, it goes to the Senate. Then a committee of members from both the House and the Senate meet to hammer out differences in the bill before it is sent to the President to be signed or vetoed.

This question is relatively straightforward, although it requires knowledge of the difference between original and appellate jurisdiction. An easy way to keep the two apart is to look at the roots and/or cognates of the two words: the root of “original,” for example, means “the beginning, or source”; the root of “appellate” is “appeal,” a technical term in law to mean the application to a higher court to reverse a lower. Thus, “original” jurisdiction must mean that the case BEGAN in that court; the questions are those of fact (e.g. did Viola Davis kill her husband in “How to Get Away with Murder”). “Appellate” jurisdiction, then, must mean that one of the parties (the losing party) disagrees with the decision of the lower court, and seeks to have it reversed—thus they appeal to a higher court. Appellate courts generally deal with questions of law, rather than those of fact. In other words, appellate courts (generally) do NOT deal with “did Viola Davis kill her husband”—the lower court does. They do, however, answer questions such as “did the lower court apply the applicable law correctly,” etc.

Now, the Supreme Court is odd in the sense that it has both original AND appellate jurisdiction; that is, it can act as both a trial court AND a court of appeals (to put it yet another way, it can answer questions of fact AND questions of law). That said, the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction is fixed in the Constitution (Remember Marbury v. Madison? That is, essentially, the reason Marbury lost). So, can Congress expand or restrict the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction willy-nilly? No. That requires a constitutional amendment (remember: the only way to change the constitution is with an amendment).

The Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction, however, is subject to the whim of Congress—Congress can add to or subtract from (or even remove) the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction simply by passing a bill (provided the President signs it, of course).

This should have been a somewhat expected question, and hopefully a relatively simple one at that. The answer choices presented to you are vastly oversimplified, as the real procedure is rather more convoluted. At any rate, the correct answer is: (1) a bill is introduced; (2) the bill is then assigned to a committee (and generally then to a subcommittee); (3) assuming that the bill makes it out of \[sub\]committee, then the Rules committee will create a rule under which the bill is to be considered; finally, the bill is brought forth to the floor for debate and consideration under the Rule and is voted on.

Bills for raising revenue must originate in the House of Representatives. This is only true for bills relating to revenue though. All other bills can originate from either the House of Representatives or the Senate. In order for a bill to be passed, the House and the Senate must both approve, and the bill must be identical in passing through both the House and the Senate.

Article I, Section 7, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution states that in the event of a presidential veto, a 2/3 vote of both the House and the Senate in favor of the bill can override the veto and turn the bill into law.

This is a relatively tricky question. There is no Rules Committee in the Senate, which is what this question asks you about. There is only a Rules Committee in the House—if this question referred to the House, then Rules Committee would be the correct answer. But, since the question asks you about the Senate, none of these answers are correct—generally speaking, bills are considered under Unanimous Consent Agreements in the Senate.

The constitution stipulates that budget bills are produced in the House of Representatives. The Congressional Budget Office advises and produces statistics for Congress and the Internal Revenue Service is in charge of collecting taxes.

While Congress is indeed responsible for overseeing both its own and the Executive branch’s administration of policy, there is no one designated slew of oversight committees. Rather, oversight duties are parceled out amongst a great many committees and subcommittees, which hold hearings to monitor their assigned situations. Each committee and subcommittee must conduct its oversight in addition to maintaining its other tasks; no single or even several strings of committees are thus dedicated solely to oversight operations. Standing committees deal with bills across a wide range of policy areas, while select committees can be convened on either a temporary or permanent basis to handle very specific issues. Joint committees are made up of members from both the House and Senate. Conference committees come into being when the Senate and the House pass differing forms of the same bill; conference committees are tasked with reconciling these differences and putting together a merged version of the bill in question.