Obama Eliminates U.S. Senate

Satire from the Onion:

In an effort to reduce wasteful spending and eliminate non-vital federal services, the U.S. government announced plans this week to cut its long-standing senator program, a move it says will help save more than $300 billion each year.

According to officials, the decision to cut the national legislative body was reached during a budget review meeting on Tuesday. After hours of deliberation, it was agreed that the cost of financing U.S. senators far outweighed the benefits they provided.

"Now more than ever, we must eliminate needless spending wherever possible," President Obama said at a press conference Wednesday. "When we sat down to go over our annual budget, we asked ourselves, where can we safely trim back? What programs can we do away with without negatively impacting the American people? Which bloated and ineffective institutions can we no longer justify having around?"

"The answer was obvious," Obama added. "The U.S. Senate just needed to go."

It's funny, if you don't stop to think about it too much. Maybe the Onion is predicting the future, because there certainly doesn't seem to be any interest in understanding the role the Senate was originally designed by the Constitution to play. As it is now, it only serves to create a vast federal bureaucracy.

Satire serves to highlight how ridiculous people can be sometimes. For example:

In fact, the program has gone unchecked for so long that many in Washington are now unable to recall what purpose U.S. senators were originally meant to serve.

...

Moreover, the study found that the U.S. government already funds a fully operational legislative body that appears to do the exact same job as the Senate, but which also provides a fair and proportional representation of the nation's citizens and has rules in place to prevent one individual from holding the operations of the entire chamber hostage until he is guaranteed massive federal spending projects for his home state of Alabama.

Reform the Senate by repealing the 17th Amendment to restore its role as protector of the Constitution. The only way this can happen is if we reach out, educate, and lead enough people into understanding why we have a Senate in the first place.