We call them political groups. Generally speaking, there's a European Parliament party for the center-left, that's the

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We call them political groups. Generally speaking, there's a European Parliament party for the center-left, that's the Social Democrats, the center rights, that's the European People's Party, basically the Christian democrats. Then in-between, there's the Greens and there's the Free Democrats, basically often known as Aldi, or an Alliance with Greens, the free market liberal types. Then there's a hard left composed of Communists and Nordic Socialists. Then there's parties on the far right, true conservatives and then the Euro skeptic parties and independence. It's notable that the Euro skeptics are not ideologically aligned in the parliament themselves. Some of them are far-left some are far-right, somewhere in-between. They can go up the works, but the Euro skeptics generally don't. They're not very influential on the parliament. The European People's Party, the center-right party, is the largest party in Parliament. But certainly if the Greens and the Free Democrats and the Social Democrats vote together, the motion is probably carried in that case. A lot of those proposals come out of the Social Democrats and the European People's Party. MEPs can send policies back to the council or to the commission, and it can demand policies of the commission. Some of the most important policies from the commission, especially for instance, the abolition of the roaming charges on cell phone providers in the European Union, or the data privacy provisions which you are familiar with from clicking "Accept" on so many different websites, those things were initially demanded by the European Parliament. Some policy goes through an extra two steps. The first goes through the Committee of the Regions. The Committee of the Regions represents sub-national units like states or cities or local governments, prefectures or provinces. The Committee of the Regions represents those sub-national governments that may not be well-represented in their home country's government. Maybe they represent a national minority, maybe they're far removed from the center of power. Whatever it is. The Committee of the Regions sometimes provides advice to the law-making process. Finally, the European Economic and Social Committee represents civil society. It's divided into three major parts. The most important, there's going to be a labor part, a business side, so a management side, and then there's going to be diversity Europe which has all other civil society organizations. That's the largest one. It represents the disability advocacy groups and the religious groups, and the lawyers groups, and the human rights groups. All of those civil society groups get together and also provide input on legislation at the EU. Again to become a law, legislation has to be passed by the EU itself, by the home countries, so the Council of Ministers, by the voters of the EU through their elected representatives on the European Parliament, through the sub-national governments in some cases, and through civil society. It's a well rounded deliberative democracy system. The Court of Justice of the European Union is the judicial branch of the EU. It's composed of two levels. The General Court which is the court of first instance and the European Court of Justice which is the court of final instance. Appeals from the General Court go to the European Court of Justice. We'll use the European Court of Justice and the CJEU interchangeably, but note for the record that they are technically speaking two different things. The CJEU has 27 judges, one from each member state, plus nine advocates general. The advocates general represent the interests of the EU. They submit opinions about the EU's position on cases. You can think of them like in the US, the Solicitor General of the United States. We have nine Supreme Court Justices and one Solicitor General. The Solicitor General argues at the Supreme Court on behalf of the Department of Justice, the US government's position on cases. That's basically what the advocates general do. They are different than what normally exists in most legal systems and they have the interests of the EU in mind. They're neutral experts basically on EU law.

The European Parliament is composed of several "political groups. " What are these political groups? What role do they play in the lawmaking process in the Parliament?