Member of Congress

A Member of Congress (MC) is a person who has been appointed or elected and inducted into some official body called congress, typically to represent a particular constituency in a legislature. Member of Parliament (MP) is an equivalent term in other jurisdictions.

United States

In referring to a lawmaker in their capacity of serving in Congress the term Member of Congress is used less often than other terms in the United States. This is because in the United States the word Congress is used as a descriptive term for the collective body of legislators, from both houses of its bicameral federal legislature, the Senate and the House of Representatives. For this reason, and in order to distinguish who is a member of which house, a member of the Senate is typically referred to as Senator (Senator "name" from "state"), and a member of the House of Representatives is usually referred to as Congressman (Congressman "name" from the "number" district of "state"), or Representative (Representative "name" from the "number" district of "state").