Let’s Hang Congress

As Mark Twain once rudely noted:

“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Regardless of your political or sexual orientation it’s hard to disagree.  The current Congress is the largest collection of brain-dead fuckwits since the previous Congress and no doubt the next Congress will be even worse.  What’s a bereaved citizen to do?

How about the simple obvious solution: let’s hang everyone in Congress!  It’s simple, direct and effective.  Left wingers will be delighted because a lot of right wingers will hang.  Right wingers will be delighted because even more left wingers will hang.  Independents will be thrilled because left and right wingers will hang.

Now I know what you are thinking,  “If we hang Congress won’t it be more difficult to find people to run for office?”  I have to agree; hanging doesn’t seem like much of an incentive.  We have to strike a balance between hanging and the grotesque perks of Congress.

Currently there are 535 members of Congress.  Let’s get a big jar of jelly beans and number the beans from 0 to 534.

0, 1, 2, 3, ..., 534

Then every year, instead of listening to boring State of the Union speeches, we hold a public drawing.  Some lucky blindfolded child,  (because we are doing it for the children),  will reach in the jar and grab a bean.  If the bean is numbered 0 we hang everyone in Congress.  If another number comes up it’s back to the trough for another year.

The typical member of Congress serves about ten years:  thank you Google.  What are the chances the average member will swing?  This is easy to compute. Generate 10 random integers between 0 and 534 and see if 0 pops up.  In the J programming language:

   ? 10 $ 535

195 467 514 498 79 345 306 344 450 530

This lucky Congress critter survived.  If we run this experiment ten million times we get:

  10000000 %~ +/ 0 e."0 1 ? 10000000 10 $ 535

0.0185448

or a 2% chance of hanging.  Considering the prerogatives, pork,  perks, and pensions of Congress a measly 2% chance of hanging seems about right.  Most of the time it’s business as usual and every now and them the public enjoys the spectacle of terminal term limits.