Fill the seats with people who wish they weren't there!

P.J. O'Rourke isn't satisfied with the election results. He has a different idea as to how we could elect people to go to Washington: use the jury system!

Certain individuals on juries would be naïve and easily suborned by special interests. They could turn out to be thieves. This has happened before in Washington. But who is more dangerous as a burglar—the thief who knows all about your valuables and where you keep them or the thief who’s never been in your house (or Senate) before?

There are, of course, no easy reforms in a long-established political system—except this one. The principles of jury selection are simple to apply to representational democracy, at least in respect to our elected officials. We don’t have to change the Constitution, we just have to change the Democratic and Republican nomination process, which is such a mess that any change would be uncontroversial.

There’s a jury pool in every political district. Call up members of the pool for jury—that is to say, nominee—duty. Let voters in primaries act like prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges, excusing some and dismissing others. When the pool has been culled to a reasonable size, the general election voters can pick whom they like. Nothing would prevent common politicians from running on third party or write-in tickets. But they’d be easily identifiable as what they are—politicians.

Then we’ll know when we’ve won an election: We’ll know we’ve won when every candidate who is voted in begins his or her acceptance speech by saying, “Oh, #@*!”