Congress Votes To Defund Itself

Story by Jacob Fricke 

| Published Apr 5, 2011

In an age when public discontent is growing over unnecessary spending and the threat of a government shutdown looms, a bipartisan commission proposed late Monday evening to do what they called “the only possible thing to solve the crisis.”

The proposal called for both houses of Congress to vote, by two thirds majority, to defund themselves and disband immediately. The proposal was quickly shuttled through the House Finance Committee and an emergency session of congress was called.

By 8pm Eastern, both houses of Congress had voted to “forthwith cease all funding for operations of the Legislative Branch of the United States government.” An hour later, the now-former Senators and Representatives had removed all personal items from the building. The power was shut down, the windows were shuttered, and the doors were locked.

Rand Paul, who had been an elected Senator for the state of Kentucky four months previously, praised the developments of the formery-legislative body.

“For too long, we’ve been arguing about the best way to cut costs and reduce the deficit,” he said in a statement on his Facebook page. “It is truly astonishing that it took us this long to realize that the true catalyst for the gridlock and lack of civility in Congress was not the issues we debated. No, it was the institution of Congress itself that was causing all the problems.”

One of the most vocal opponents of the plan was now-former Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts. At press time, he had refused to leave the building grounds. An outgoing building groundskeeper, who wished to remain unnamed, said that this was a fairly common occurrence. “He’ll cry himself to sleep eventually, like he always does.”

President Barack Obama is “delighted” by the development.

“And here I was, thinking that I would have to justify going to war in Libya to the US Congress. Thank god it was never necessary.”