Question

Committees serve several important purposes in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Explain two purposes that they serve.

Answer 1

It's not really plausible for the entire House or Senate to debate in detail every single proposed law. Very few laws would get passed. So instead once a member proposes a bill, they tend to hand off the back-and-forth debate about a wording that will appeal to the entire house to a small committee. Since the committee has only a few members, it's possible to sit in a room and argue and debate at length on a bill, make sure everyone is heard, and hammer out a wording that is likely to appeal to the entire house (or at least a majority of it).

Additionally, committees tend to specialize, e.g. there's a committee on the military, on space, on the budget, on Social Security, on foreign affairs, and so forth. Over time, the members of the committee become highly knowledgeable about these areas of Congressional responsibility, so they can write even better bills. They can even debate issues related to their fields of expertise and propose bills to the larger house.

In some cases committees of Congress serve investigational functions, too. For example, the "Fast and Furious" scandal in which the Obama Administration alllowed criminal gangs in Mexico to buy weapons in the United States, has triggered hearings before Congress, in which members of the Administration are quizzed about what they've done, so that Congress can exercise appropriate oversight. It seems likely that if Barack Obama wins the election today, there will be hearings in the House over the affair in Benghazi where an American ambassador and several of his security officer were killed when jihadis overran the compound and no military backup was provided. These kinds of hearings may happen in front of a standing committee, or one constituted specially for the purpose, but having a committee instead of the full House or Senate allows more time for questions and back and forth, because the committees are smaller.

One more issue maybe worth mentioning is that there are sometimes committees to perserve national security, e.g. if the government is involved in some very secret military operations, to preserve maximum security only a few Congressman or Senators (the leadership, e.g. Speaker and Majority Leaders, plus heads of national security-related committees) will be briefed. For example, when the Bush Administration decided to "waterboard" some captured jihadis, they first briefed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, so that either could object if he saw fit. (Neither did at the time.)