It is the reason nothing a governing body decides counts unless enough people actually showed up. And it is the word this whole company is named for.
A quorum is the minimum number of members who must be present for a meeting to do real business. Below that line, a legislature, a board, a council cannot lawfully act. The decisions of three people who wandered in do not bind everyone else.
The word is Latin, quorum, meaning of whom. It comes from old English commissions that named the specific people whose presence was required, written in Latin: quorum vos, of whom we wish you to be one. Over time the opening word came to mean the required body itself.
The Constitution builds it in. Each house of Congress needs a quorum, a majority of its members, to conduct business, and a smaller number can compel absent members to show up. The framers did not want a handful of people passing laws for a nation while everyone else was away.
