This Congress of Fools Must Be Ended

There is much ruin in a Republic, as we are presently discovering

Money is the symbol and measure of human labor. A man works for an hour and gains money, and so that money symbolizes and counts his very lifeforce. It is precious; we have but one life to give. So the use of it by our leaders is of even more import. They are channeling the labor of millions of souls to various ends. We've seen this used wisely by our leaders in the past, to build great bridges, dams, monuments, fleets, and railroads. All of these create wealth that bless us for generations.

With the supreme power of the purse, the Legislature of times past took that great accumulation of human labor and spent it in a mostly wise fashion. There were flaws, there were errors, but there was also wisdom.

Can the same be said of our current Legislature? No. In no way.

With the work of the DOGE we now see fully the corruption and ineptitude of the Legislature. The Legislature has been spending trillions without any attempt to control its use. A bizarre sentence, sure, but true. Day after day we see some new department or NGO with a director making half a million a year and a budget of tens of millions undertaking some crazed project, or no project at all. It's been used for graft, for ruin, for nothing.

Rather than being concentrated to build capital and wealth, the money has been frittered away into a million different hands all across the globe, to be spent on purple hair dye, Jefferson tickets, dildos, and Reddit bling. That precious essence of human life was poured onto the ground, wasted, like blood splattered on the rocks of an obscene altar to the god of fools.

Across the nation a profound anger is rising at the sight of this waste. We all knew the money was spent badly, but now we learn it was also spent wrongly. Threats to cease paying taxes are common, and rightly so. If their use of our lifeforce is so utterly foolish, then we are fools to give it to them.

How can we fix this? As the lords of the purse the Legislature is chiefly to blame. Watch only an hour of our honored representatives at work and one immediately sees the problem: They are at best idiots, or worse, fiends, or worst of all, both.

These feckless and odious creatures prance and rave in equal measure; they are mad players who treat the podium as a stage, grasp the gavel only for the power to prostitute, and hold duty as dung. They are well-paid whores, except they are less than whores, for whores at least entertain. These shouting schoolmarms are the epitome of dull. Loud yes, and proud, but utterly empty of essence or interest. A cow chewing its cud is stupid, yes, but also quiet and at peace. A monkey leaping about and stealing trinkets from tourists is annoying, but also laughed at for its antics. God has made each beast with a quality despite its detriments, except the congressman, who somehow combines the dim wit and regurgitative mouth of the cow with the screeches, theft, and shit-flinging of a monkey. Harpies, all; may God damn them, thoroughly.¹

If our Legislature is the most democratic of the three houses, in that it most represents the will of the people, then our democracy is close to death. There are many who welcome it, and who can blame them? Could a king do any worse? Already the Legislature mostly serves as a functionary. More than half the budget is Mandatory Spending, meaning it must be given regardless of the Legislature. Much of the rest is simply given to the bureaucrats to spend as they please. Our Congress is powerless, relegated by their own ineptitude and spinelessness to the role of bank teller.

We must admit that if the Legislature was stripped of all power and turned into a ceremonial body it'd be a net gain for the nation.

We may be on the cusp of such an action. Our Executive under President Trump is seeming to make great strides to spend the money well, but there is only so much they can do. The DOGE can effect how the money is spent, but not that it's spent at all. At the end of the year the various departments will still have that enormous bag of money. Only the Legislature can take it back or reduce the bag's size. Yet they refuse to do so. Just recently the leader of the Senate proposed a spending bill of INCREASED size.² As if all the work of the DOGE hadn't happened. As if we haven't seen for the last month all the waste. In a total disconnect from reality he proceeds with business as usual. Those fossils know no other way but corruption. No, if reform is to come the Legislature must be bypassed completely. Like the courts, they will have to be ignored.

We shouldn't rejoice at the prospect, because it very easily could become a permanent expedient. In fact, it WILL become permanent, because the Legislature's character simply won't change. If we somehow overcome this crisis, the Congress will create another one in time. The means we have for selecting Legislators guarantees they will be corrupt fools.

What is the cause? There are many but the primary cause is the political parties. They've gerrymandered the districts such that most elections aren't competitive. Everyone gets the representative selected for them by the party - The rural areas and suburbs get the Republican, the cities get the Democrat. This makes party affiliation and, most of all, loyalty, more important than ability or integrity. The parties have also made running against them, either with a third party or as an independent, extremely difficult to do. Because of the immense expense of getting elected, only the very rich can do so, or those willing to absolutely submit themselves to party dictates in order to get access to party funds. This is how we have idiots raving at committee hearings.

Reforming the political parties from within won't fix either of those problems. The parties must be removed from the selection process. If we want to save the Republic we must completely reform how our Legislators are selected.

The primary purpose of this essay was to identify the problem. A solution will be suggested here, but only in brief.

First, the Senate needs to be returned to the original selection process as envisioned by our Founders - Each state chooses two senators.

Second, the Congress needs to be chosen via sortition³ - Or simply, randomly.

This will remove political parties from the process of selecting members to office, with all the problems incumbent. With a random selection process political parties will become again what they were meant to be - An alliance of politically like-minded individuals.

We must admit that the normal process for selecting representatives of the people eventually fails. In our case the political parties have corrupted the process, and so we have bad results. In our Republic it has failed, in the French Republic it failed, in the Roman Republic it failed, in the Greek democracy it failed. Can we not at last admit that the people choosing a representative body must indeed fail? The results from all history are in, and they aren't great.

Yet, the beating heart of a democracy is the congress of the people, and so we desperately need it. We need men of quality in our Congress, yet it seems to be the curse of mankind to find every way possible to fail at doing this. Could we perhaps do what previous democracies have failed to do - Improve the system and alter our course?

If we don't we will have a dictatorship; a very American dictatorship, but a dictatorship nonetheless. Oh, at first it will be a breath of fresh air - At last we're free of these fools and blowhards! Free of the waste! But as the years go on the corruption once spread amongst a Congress will be concentrated in one man. He will have all the power of the technological state at his fingertips. Our current situation, a benign soft-tyranny run by DEI hires and party loyalists, able to dispense money but not able to dispense with men, will be replaced, eventually, with one far more dangerous.

We can head off that dark future by reforming our Congress. For our sake, and for our children's sake.

1. Except Massie (See:

Classy Thomas Massie

) and a select few others. Could you imagine a Congress composed of such men? Or a Senate composed of men like Rand Paul? (See:

Rand Paul Review

)

2. The bill passed by Congress attempts at cuts, touting two trillion, but that is over ten years, and is left to subcommittees, and is pending the reconciliation process, so in reality it means no cuts whatsoever. We’ve done this before - Mark my words, nothing of substance will be cut by our Legislature.

3. Delving into the mechanics of sortition is the subject of a separate essay.