Better to remember that the individuals that make up the whole are still independent individuals and that the whole as an entity only exists in our minds.
We have a tendency to anthropomorphize things. Corporations, Congress, religions, anything that is a group of people can be thought of as a unique, distinct entity of its own. But really, they aren't. Congress isn't one thing, it's 535 people who each have their own brains, their own decision structures. It may be a convenient model to treat them as a single entity at times, but as with all models, it is only an approximation and fails in corner cases.
I pushed a lot of people to remember this when governing our hackerspace. The space was not a thing without the people in it. A lot of people were talking about "the needs of the space" and "where the space was going", talking like there was a creature called The Space who had her own wishes and desires and we needed to be considerate of them. Once we broke that lunacy down, we saw that nobody actually wanted the things people said The Space wanted, it was just assumed these were things everyone wanted, so they went along to not violate the sanctity of The Space.
The Constitution falls into anthropomorphizing Congress. It says, "Congress shall make no law", not "The people in Congress shall make no law." It's the old kid's joke of, "who broke the cookie jar? Nobody! Wow, this Nobody guy sure does break a lot of stuff." If Congress did it, than no individual did it. If Congress is held accountable for something, then no individual can be held accountable.
