Now to bring GK Chesterton’s wonderful quotation into a more specific context, and also make it slightly less extreme than to involve a rope: how terrible it is to contemplate how few Congressmen get booted out of office.

Take the House of Representatives for instance. The Constitution in Article I, Section 5 states “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.” There have only ever been five House members expelled. Three of them were expelled during the Civil War for treason. A fourth was expelled in 1980 for accepting bribes from FBI agents dressed as Arab sheiks. And the latest, and fifth of the number, is a Democrat by the name of James Traficant who before July 25th represented Ohio’s 17th district.

Mr. Traficant was convicted by a jury on 10 felony counts, including bribery, tax evasion and racketeering. But just as there are no guilty men in prison, there are no guilty men in the House, although the percentage of crooks is probably comparable.

To that charge of guilt, Traficant testified to his innocence in his closing remarks to the House ethics panel, “I want you to disregard all the opposing counsel has said. I think they’re delusionary. I think they’ve had something funny for lunch in their meal, I think they should be handcuffed, chained to a fence and flogged, and all of their hearsay evidence should be thrown the hell out. And if they lie again, I’m going to go over there and kick them in the crotch. Thank you very much.”

[side note: If only we could hook every House member up to a lie detector and appoint a very special person to run around the House kicking people in the crotch every time they lied. Wouldn’t that make CSPAN a bit more interesting?]

With little surprise, the House voted 420 to 1 to expel Traficant.

Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-California, defended the expulsion saying that is was “about Americans having confidence that their people in the House of Representatives, their representatives, are honest and that they have integrity.” That’s the difference between politicians and us regular folks, they have complete control over their gag reflex. Show of hands on how many of the Americans reading this have confidence in their representatives’ honesty and integrity.

Ethics Committee member Gene Green, D-Texas, said “This is the people’s house, and we have to do our job. If we can’t remove a member of Congress who has been convicted of 10 felonies-including using his office for personal gain-we risk losing the faith and trust of the American people that we have.” Translated into English that reads, “We have to expel a couple people every hundred years or so to keep up appearances.”

And in the big list of oxymorons, “Congressional Ethics Committee” rates just behind “military intelligence.” Who do these people think they’re fooling?

They’re all crooks. It’s in the job description. That isn’t to say that every one of them is a felon, there are many subtle levels and degrees. It’s just that the not-so-subtle ones stand out, such as convicted or not convicted. It is impossible to believe that the only five members expelled in the House’s 213 year history were the only ones deserving of receiving the boot.

The assumption should be that they are all deserving. And with that assumption (not much of a stretch with Enron and WorldCom is it?) they should all of them, every single congressman, be booted out of office periodically. There is such a wonderful name to place on this institutional ouster-term limits. Then we can stop contemplating that terrible thought of how few politicians are hanged.