Fire the Bums!

Here is the premise:

Not only is the US Congress broken, it has a vested interest in remaining broken. The parties doen't want to work - they want to win. They are bums. All of them. In their blind and dangerous tug-of-war for power and influence, they clearly act as if only one thing can be true: if our opponents win, we have lost. So the American people, serving as the stressed and strained rope, are pulled and pulled, while no thought is given to our losses, except when our losses begin to affect the parties doing the pulling. Nobody in Washington is pulling for us. Instead, they are jerking us around, and for all the world seem to believe that this is what they were hired to do.

Which is exactly why we need to fire them. The American people have only one real power over these incompetent fools. We can fire them. We can remove each of them, individually, from their positions of power. We may not be able to remove the parties that have placed themselves in positions of mutually assured destruction, but we certainly can fire the individual automatons who have shown themselves time and again to be clearly unwilling to do what is right for the American people if it means even the slightest threat of strategic weakening to their party.

We do not have to put up with this. We deserve better. Congress has a 4% approval rating because they DO NOT DO THEIR JOB. At best, they do their job very poorly, at far too great a cost. I used a dog-sitter once who I was more or less 4% happy with. Moral of the story: I used her ONCE. Then I fired her. Because she sucked at her job. Congress sucks at its job. They deserve to be fired. Let us start obliging them.

Here is what I propose: every congress that has a less than 50% approval rating should be fired as a class. Until American politicians get it through their heads that the people they should worry about pleasing is the American public and NOT their own political parties and special interest groups, we should fire them all. How do we do this?

Fire the incumbent.

Each election that comes by in which Congress continues to put the American people second to anything or anyone, every incumbent should be fired.

Of course, this means that a few good politicians will lose their jobs, but I don't think we need to worry about them. They will drift off on their golden parachutes and land in comfy professorships or write tell-all books, or get hired as consultants for millions. They will be OK. And they will be replaced by someone who is at least as competent as they are. How do I know this? Because almost anyone in the United States is capable of doing a job as badly as our US Congress does its job.

For instance: I have never, not a single day in my life, worked as an underwater welder. Even so, I am pretty sure I could do that to a 4% satisfaction level. Almost all my welds would fail, I would waste tons of money and time, and someone who came after me would be left to clean up my mess. I would be just like Congress. And I would also get fired. Like they should. So, no matter who replaces the fired old congress will be just as good if not better than the old schmucks were. They literally can't be much worse.

If we do this as a Nation, our politicians, in short order, would be compelled to do something that they haven't had to do in maybe since forever: give first priority to the needs of their constituents. But if we don't do this, if we don't exercise the only real power that we have over our politicians, how can we ever expect them to change. The system that has broken our nation and brought us years of unresolved problems may be killing your average citizen, but it is simultaneously keeping our politicians in office. It is time we changed that.

So let's start flexing some citizen muscle and fire the bums. Whichever bum is yours, next time elections come around, show him what 4% satisfaction means. Show him/her the door.