A legislature is a kind of deliberative assembly with the power to pass, amend, and repeal laws. The law created by a legislature is called legislation or statutory law. In addition to enacting laws, legislatures usually have exclusive authority to raise or lower taxes and adopt the budget and other money bills. Legislatures are known by many names, the most common being parliament and congress, although these terms also have more specific meanings.

In parliamentary systems of government, the legislature is formally supreme and appoints a member from its house as the prime minister which acts as the executive. In a presidential system, according to the separation of powers doctrine, the legislature is considered an independent and coequal branch of government along with both the judiciary and the executive.

The primary components of a legislature are one or more chambers or houses: assemblies that can debate and vote upon bills. A legislature with only one house is called unicameral. A bicameral legislature possesses two separate chambers, usually described as an upper house and a lower house, which often differ in duties, powers, and the methods used for the selection of members. Much rarer have been tricameral legislatures; the Massachusetts Governor's Council still exists, but the most recent national example existed in the waning years of caucasian-minority rule in South Africa.

Mike Bost (born December 30, 1960) is a Republican member of the Illinois House of Representatives, representing the 115th district where he has served since 1995.

Bost was a firefighter before entering politics and becoming a full-time state legislator and business owner. He graduated from Murphysboro High School, attended the University of Illinois Certified Firefighter II Academy, and served in the United States Marine Corps (1979–82). He and his wife Tracy have three children and six grandchildren.

Bost sponsors many firearm bills in support of the right to bear arms. He was a passionate opponent of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. In May 2012, upset over a bill to overhaul state pensions, Bost screamed and threw papers on the Illinois House floor because the House was only given twenty minutes to review and vote on a two-hundred page bill.

Halle Berry ( /ˈhæli ˈbɛri/; born August 14, 1966) is an American actress and a former fashion model. Berry received an Emmy, Golden Globe, SAG, and an NAACP Image Award for Introducing Dorothy Dandridge and won an Academy Award for Best Actress and was nominated for a BAFTA Award in 2001 for her performance in Monster's Ball, becoming the first and, as of 2012, only woman of African American descent to have won the award for Best Actress. She is one of the most highly paid actresses in Hollywood and also a Revlon spokesmodel. She has been involved in the production side of several of the films in which she performed.

Before becoming an actress, Berry entered several beauty contests, finishing as the 1st runner-up in the Miss USA Pageant (1986), and coming in 6th place in the Miss World Pageant in 1986. She made her film debut with a small role in 1991's Jungle Fever. This led to starring roles in The Flintstones (1994), Bulworth (1998), X-Men (2000) and its sequels, and as Bond Girl Jinx in Die Another Day (2002). She also won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress in 2005 for Catwoman and accepted the award in person—one of the few performers to do so.

Melissa Victoria Harris-Perry (born October 2, 1973; formerly known as Melissa Harris-Lacewell) is an American author, television host and political commentator with a focus on African-American politics. Harris-Perry hosts the eponymously named Melissa Harris-Perry weekend news and opinion television show on MSNBC.

She is a professor of political science at Tulane University. Prior to that, she was an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University from 2006 to 2010, and taught political science at the University of Chicago from 1999 to 2005.

Melissa Victoria Harris was born in Seattle and grew up in the Virginia cities of Charlottesville and Chester, where she attended Thomas Dale High School. Part of a blended family, she is the youngest of five children. Her black father, William M. Harris Sr., was dean of Afro-American affairs at the University of Virginia, and her white mother, Diana Gray, taught at a community college and worked for nonprofits that helped poor communities. Her mother was raised in a Mormon working class family in a racially homogeneous neighborhood and went to college at Brigham Young University. After a failed first marriage, her mother left the LDS Church and was a single mother and sole breadwinner before she met Melissa's father. “I’ve never thought of myself as biracial,” Harris-Perry says. “I’m black.”