Skep Fixes the Government with a Thin Piece of Wood
I don't know if y'all been following what's going on in the House lately, but man is it bananas.
(This post is largely a jape rather than legitimate political critique by the way. C'mon, you know my style by now. If you're not interested in a very basic recap of the ludicrious series of events that inspired this post, skip the next few paragraphs.)
To make a very long explanation of what's happening very short, the Republicans have a terribly slim majority in one of the States' lawmaking bodies right now, which in theory means they could pass whatever the hell they wanted. However, their majority is so slim that they're being pushed around by a handful of shit-kicking hard-right reps who want things THEIR way and are willing to throw a tantrum over it. So any Republican who wants to get anything done in the House has to either placate these pot-stirrers (which is bad), or placate the Democats (which is worse somehow?)
Anyway, this small group ended up getting the last Speaker of the House voted out (because he placated the Democrats)(once)(to temporarily stop the federal goverment from shutting down). Nobody else really wants the job (because it's impossible to please anybody, see above), but there's effectively nothing getting done until they can pick somebody. A fellow far-right shit-kicker decided to try despite objectively being bad as his job, so you know we're scraping the bottom of the barrel over here. But not all the reps liked him, and they liked him even less once his voting base started calling their offices making ugly threats.
And after a couple rounds of this guy not getting enough votes within his own political party, the shit-kickers—who really like this guy—wrote a letter saying, hey, we're willing to let you punish us somehow for our role in getting rid of the last Speaker if you just vote this guy in.
Of course, it didn't happen. But I have to be honest; if I was one of those holdouts, I would have had a very hard time not taking them up on that offer. Because the mental image of these shit-kicking politicians getting a good, old-fashioned paddlin' just delights me so much.
And it occurs to me... maybe THIS is how we fix politics. Because one of the biggest complaints we have as citizens is there's no accountability for our elected officials. If they act like an asshole or a whiny baby, what can we do? Best-case, we elect somebody different next go-around, and even that's not a sure thing.
So, I say we institute paddlin's.
Because, think about it. You'd be watching your attitude REAL closely if you knew that at any time, you could be taken out into the Mall in front of everybody and given five or ten sharp whacks on your bare bum-bum with a wooden paddle. Just hard enough to sting a bit, of course; the most severe damage would obviously be to one's pride.
I'm still working out some of the kinks (no pun intended) on this. I think you'd need a good two-thirds vote to avoid abuse, but I'm undecided whether that should come from your peers in Washington, or from the good old American people. And you would need somebody to design and manufacture the official Federal Paddle Board; I'm not sure who is in charge of that. I guess you'd have to assemble a Federal Paddle Board Board.
BUT I do know that the official administering the paddlings would be elected by the citizens. I'm thinking once every four years, at the same time as the president. Because you KNOW the political ads for that position would be off-the-wall bonkers; I think it would really offset the fatigue of constant presidential smear ads when you got prospective paddlers trying to one-up each other for this largely ceremonial position.
This would also be a great position for celebrities who want to enjoy the thrill of running for office without their inexperience or ego being a liability to the country's stability. I think for its inaugaral election, I'd like to nominate Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Beyonce as potential candidates.
I honestly can't guess who would win that one.