I did not set out to compare the United States Congress to a medical condition. I want to be clear about that. But the numbers are what they are, and Frank deals in numbers.
In 2023, Gallup put Congressional approval at 12%. That same year, a Harris poll found that 12% of Americans reported chronic hemorrhoid issues. I am not making this up. I have the tabs open. One of these groups costs the average American about $38 in over-the-counter treatment. The other costs the average American $16,000 a year in federal tax burden plus an unknowable amount in lost sleep, lost faith, and lost patience.
The hemorrhoid, while uncomfortable and occasionally requiring professional attention, has never once voted itself a pay raise. It has never appeared on cable news to explain why the thing it promised last election cycle still has not happened. It has never formed a bipartisan committee to study the feasibility of doing the thing it was specifically elected to do. The hemorrhoid simply exists, causes discomfort, and eventually goes away.
Congress has been around since 1789. The hemorrhoid comparison does not favor Congress.
Here is what Frank actually wants you to understand.
We have had 535 members of Congress since the beginning. We have had the same two parties in power for over 150 years. We have had the same arguments about spending, the same arguments about rights, the same arguments about who is ruining the country, since before your grandparents were born. And every two years we walk into a voting booth and pick from the same two options and expect something different to come out the other side.
There is a clinical term for that. Frank knows what it is. Frank is too polite to use it here. Frank is not usually too polite for anything, which tells you something about how strongly he feels about it.
The Founders were not stupid men. They were in fact some of the most well-read, strategically minded, politically sophisticated people this continent has ever produced. They built a system specifically designed to prevent the concentration of power, to force compromise, to make it hard for any one faction to run the table. They were so worried about exactly what we have right now that they wrote multiple documents warning us about it.
Madison wrote about factions in Federalist No. 10. He used different language but the concern was identical: what happens when the people who are supposed to represent you start representing themselves instead? What happens when the institution becomes more interested in its own survival than in the job it was created to do?
What happens is a 12% approval rating. What happens is we compare them to hemorrhoids and the hemorrhoid wins on points.
So what do you do with that?
Frank is not here to tell you who to vote for. Frank is not here to wave a flag for either team. Frank has watched both teams play for five decades and the scoreboard does not flatter either one of them.
What Frank is here to tell you is this: read the Constitution. Not the bumper sticker version. Not the cable news version where whoever is in power is either saving it or destroying it depending on which channel you are watching. The actual document. It takes about 22 minutes. Frank timed it.
Then read the Federalist Papers. They are the user manual. They explain why every piece of it is there. They were written by the people who built the thing, for the people who were going to live under it, because those people had questions and deserved real answers.
Then look at what we have now and ask yourself honestly whether the people currently occupying the building are doing the job the document describes.
Frank already knows the answer. Frank suspects you do too.
The good news about hemorrhoids is they respond to treatment. The jury is still out on Congress. But Frank has not given up. Frank has just stopped pretending the problem is the other party.
The problem is all of them. The solution starts with you knowing exactly what they are supposed to be doing.
Read the document.
— Frank