A Modest Proposal

There seems to be a groundswell of general concensus about how obvious it is that the members of Congress are a lot more interested in winning re-election than actually governing; while I'm sure that notion has been around since the dawn of elected officials, the current Congress seems particularly happy and willing to tie itself up into Chinese handcuffs in a way that prevents itself from actually doing anything mildly worthwhile, yet allows for a "hey, what can ya do?" shrug that prevents voters from being angry enough to vote them out of office. And why not? Of course nobody would wanna give up such a heightened position of power and status; particularly in days like the present, wherein Congress has given itself even MORE power by making it very easy for members representing miniscule populations to completely hold sway over legislation just so they can feel even more important. And obviously Congress' power isn't gonna be scaled back any time soon, and the desire to retain their spots means more Chinese handcuffs, less goodwill etc etc.

To me, the key is to somehow make the job as undesirable as possible, one in which you'd have to work very hard in return for very little. A coupla years ago I wrote HERE;

But oh, we tell ourselves, teaching is a higher calling, teachers do it cause they love it! They’d do it for free; they’re thrilled to be getting anything!!! Meanwhile we pay janitors at these schools twice as much – I guess we think of janitors as being an ambitious, money-hungry conniving bunch, so it’s okay to pay them. We applaud Wall Street hotshots who sit at a big desk moving money around on the internet and own three Porsches, but get bent out of shape whenever the people that stay with our children all day, teach them how to read and write, try to teach them right and wrong, protect them and drive them to away games get uppity and demand a real salary. We expect them to do all the above for almost nothing cause that’s the way it always has been (ie has historically been a woman’s job)

Which means, just like how we treat teachers like crap because we've allowed it to still be portrayed as a "woman's field," we should make it so that only women can be in Congress. Drop the pay, drop the prestige, and give it a vague sense that they're doing "back-breaking, thankless God's work, and gee, they'd do it for free if they could!!" and watch them break their backs getting shit done and not really give a shit about upcoming elections. Much like a teacher who's like "fuck this, I hope I get fired, I'm sick of this shit!!" we need to make it so that as members of Congress they're like "re-election's coming up? Good, I hope they vote some other dumb-ass sucker in to do this shit!" The sweeping reform and bipartisan legislation would be mind-boggling.