the congress is the Senate + the House. Both can introduce laws which must then be approved by the other. If someone sees fit to challenge these laws on a constitutional basis, the _might_ be heard by the supreme court (if the supremes deam it worth hearing). The rest of the judicial branch does make judgements on the laws, you're correct. The Executive branch is responsible for execution of the laws passed, although the President as head of the executive branch and a leader of his party has some level of influence on what laws get passed, proposed, and stalled out in commitee.
Yes, the senate is supposed to have a longer view, and actually a more patrician view - it's harder to get into the senate. Whether six years is sufficiently longer is another question. Not that I'm in favor of a 'House of Lords' type thing where you're in for life!
One thing to remember is that our fondling fathers had in mind that our senators and representatives would be from the landed intelligencia - folks like themselves - who could be trusted to make long term decisions in view of what would be best for the country, and could be trusted to discuss the issues like gentlement (that'd be by dueling, for fans of Alex Hamilton).
One of our current problems is that instead of that ideal, utopian (remember, that means 'nowhere' translated literally) vision, we've got a bunch of muckraking lawyers. Our own damn fault - we keep voting them in, and we allowed an environment where you've gotta be a power hungry, doubledealing scumbag (lechery is just a bonus that we get with the package) to even want to serve your country in this way (not that they're all bad - it just looks that way sometimes).
Of course, our greatest strength as a country is that I'm free to say this. Which is why I'm more worried about the president of Nike not being allowed to defend his company's labor practices because it's 'commercial speach' than about whether there is a law forcing me to do what an intelligent person will do anyway. Not that I like that law - I think we should let stupid people extinguish themselves in the name of darwin. Maybe make the stunterboys not wear helments.