Federal Government of the United States

“They govern things. And things need to be governed because if they weren't it would be anarchy which is a lot like football except it isn't a team sport, there is no ball or endzones, and there are no rules. So that would be like bad. The government is needed to make laws and rules like in football which is not hockey. Laws and rules are important so there is no anarchy which is a lot like football except it isn't a team sport, there is no ball or endzones, and there are no rules. So that would be like bad. As you can see Brett Farve is god.”

~ John Madden on the government

The government of the United States, established by the Constitution of the United States, is a federal republic comprising 50 States, the District of Columbia, and a bunch of places that we don't give a rat's ass about because they don't speak English there. Under the Constitution, power is delegated both between the national Federal government and the various local State governments, and between the various branches of the federal government. The federal government consists of five branches: the executive branch, the legislative branch, the Illuminati, the judicial branch and Kevin Bacon.

Because of its size, broad powers and capabilities, the Federal Government of the United States is typically referred to as the most powerful governing body in the world and the world's sole superpower. This designation is also given to the Illuminati, which is a subdivision of the Federal Government.

Division of Powers between Federal and State Governments

The hallmark of a federal system is that powers are divided between the various levels of government. Throughout the world, there are many systems for this, but the Federal Government divides power based on degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. Things within two degrees of Kevin Bacon are the domain of the Federal Government, things separated from Kevin Bacon by three, four or five degrees are the domain of a State government, and things six or more degrees away from Kevin Bacon are the rights reserved by the citizens.

An example of federal power, as decided by the Supreme Court, is to allow all use of marijuana. This power is obtained through the following sequence:

Kevin Bacon makes lots of Money  ::  Money can be used to purchase Marijuana  ::  therefore the government can regulate marijuana.

This power is derived from the most commonly used sequence, which uses money as the initial link to Kevin Bacon. Powers derived this way are called commerce powers.

Correspondingly, an example of a State power is to regulate marriage, a power derived through this sequence:

Kevin Bacon was in the movie Footloose  ::  Footloose is Pat Robertson's favorite movie  ::  Pat Robertson is disgusted by gay marriage  ::  therefore a State government can ban gay marriage.

Legislative Branch

“If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of Progress?”

~ Some over-quoted mofo on Congress

The Bongington Monument also has two chambers.

Article I of the Constitution grants all legislative powers of the Federal Government to the Congress, which is divided into two chambers. Because the great Bongington Monument had not been built at the time the Constitution was ratified, it is assumed that this two-chambered body is the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The House

In order to facilitate lawmaking, the Framers established that one house of Congress would be apportioned by the tax base of each region, and that these Representatives would be strictly bound by ethical rules to vote for whatever side gave them the most money. Later this was found to be too long of a process and the House established a drive-thru window for new laws. Would you like to supersize your tax loophole, today? It's only $39. Alright, please pay at the next window. If we're too busy to help you at the next window, drive forward and we'll have someone bring your loophole out to you in the parking lot. The guy behind you is going to be pissed, because he's going to get his loophole before you from the window, but he won't be able to leave, because you'll be blocking the way out. Sorry for the inconvenience, but this is how things work in the capitol.

The Senate

In order to unfacilitate lawmaking, the Framers also established another house, which would be apportioned based on how well State borders could be gerrymandered. (Ever wondered why there are so many Red States with two Senators but only five people? It's because they were admitted by a Republican Congress.) By law, all members of the Senate are either incoherent or incontinent, a measure which keeps the Senate from ever accomplishing anything.

The Executive Branch

Established in Article II of the playbook, the executive branch consists of the federal police, the military, the Federal Bureaucracy, the President, the Vice President and the cabinet. Do what they say...or else.

The President

While the duty of writing legislation falls to the legislature, it is the President's job as Commander in Chief to sign that legislation into law and enforce it. The President may also veto a bill, preventing it from taking effect unless the Congress overrides the veto or assassinates him in Dallas, Texas.

While the President has the police and military at his disposal, he mostly enforces the laws of nation on a personal level, something he can do because of his superpowers. In a tradition begun at the founding with the American Justice Coalition and resurrected by the experimental Manhattan Project, all United States Presidents are endowed with super-powers at inauguration using various radioactive formulas.

Presidential Beards

Once upon a time in America, Republican beards ruled the land, and almost all of God’s children were content, except for the usual suspects. There was only one clean-shaven man in the White House in the years between 1860 and 1896, and the House of Representatives impeached him. I do not believe that the House impeached Andrew Johnson because he shaved on a regular basis, although his lack of a proper beard may have contributed to the political establishment’s visceral dislike of him, that and his turning up drunk for his own inauguration as Vice President. Inaugurating under the influence may not be a ticketable offense in many states, but it does tend to give the tourists an unfavorable impression of the Federal Government and annoys the citizenry no end. Johnson’s impeachment was wildly popular amongst all segments of the bearded population; it was even popular with women, who could not vote at the time, beards or no beards.

Subsequent candidates learned their lesson; all Republican presidential candidates after Johnson had beards, even if not all Republican presidents did. The exception was Chester Alan Arthur, who wore a Burnside — a full mustache and side — whiskers with a clean chin. It bears pointing out here, however, that Arthur was an accidental President; he was actually the Republican Party’s Vice-Presidential candidate in 1880. James A. Garfield, the party’s presidential candidate and the eventual winner of the election itself, wore a full beard, as did Charles Guiteau, the man who shot Garfield as he waited for a train. Many of the doctors who treated Garfield also had full beards and it is still a matter of contention among many historians whether or not the doctors’ beards played any role in causing the infection that eventually killed Garfield, or whether it was just the doctors’ medical ignorance in poking around in the presidential bullet hole with dirty instruments that did Garfield in. In any case, after a reasonably fair trial, the government hanged Guiteau and his beard for shooting Garfield, while the doctors who actually killed the President found that their well-publicized incompetence actually enhanced their medical prestige and allowed them to go on and kill a good many other lesser-known and thoroughly unpresidential people and to charge the unfortunate wretches they killed that much more for the privilege.

The Democrats tried to make themselves tonsorially convincing, but failed, for the most part. The only Democrat elected to the presidency during the bearded period was Grover Cleveland (Johnson was a Democrat too, but he only got in because Lincoln wanted to be bipartisan in 1864), who was the proud possessor of a walrus mustache, which was about as hairy as any Democrat would allow himself to be in those days. Cleveland’s opponent in the 1884 presidential election was James G. Blaine, a Republican senator from Maine blessed with a full beard and cursed with the bad habit of annoying the voters. Beard or no beard, hanging around with people who trash the voters, as Blaine was wont to do, is not a recipe for long-term political success in the United States or anywhere else, for that matter. Voters at that time also found Blaine’s building a $50,000 mansion for himself on a senator’s $5,000 a year salary a bit off-putting as well. Cleveland lost the 1888 election to Benjamin Harrison, who did have a full beard, and then won again in 1892, all the while courting and eventually marrying a woman young enough to be his daughter, which was more than a little scandalous and tended to confirm the idea many people at the time had that a clean-shaven Democratic face was the devil’s playground.

Why, you may ask, were beards so presidentially necessary at that time? Certainly, the Founding Fathers did not wear beards. One can no more imagine George Washington with a beard than one can imagine Fidel Castro without one. From the founding of this, our Great Republic, to 1860, no American president wore a beard, although James Buchanan needed one. Even Lincoln won the 1860 election without a beard. He grew one a short time later, because he would not allow Jefferson Davis, the Confederate President, who wore a goatee, to outdo the President of the United States in any fashion. And so the war came.

After Lincoln, all Republican presidents wore a beard, in tonsorial homage to the great man and to pander to the bearded vote out in the Midwest, although in fairness to Ulysses S. Grant, he already had a beard when Lincoln became President and so no one can accuse him of political me-tooism. In a post-Lincoln environment, everyone wanted to emulate Lincoln’s political success without the down side of getting shot — Garfield was singularly unsuccessful in this regard — and so beards became a necessary adjunct to gaining political office for Republicans. Some politicians like Governor Hezekiah T. Fletcher of Kansas drove the trend to extremes. The good governor wanted the 1876 Republican presidential nomination and decided to grow a beard down to his knees to demonstrate what a good, stalwart champion of old-fashioned Republican virtues he was. While campaigning in Philadelphia at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, Governor Fletcher made a speech defending the high tariff on foreign manufactures against some Democratic calumny when, in an unfortunate moment meant to be dramatic, he threw his beard over his shoulder and into the maw of a newly patented industrial sausage-making machine made in Germany, which promptly pulled the governor in and reduced him to about 150 pounds of politically unenviable bratwurst before anyone could figure out how to turn the machine off, the instructions on the machine being written in German. The misadventure also ruined the governor’s new suit, which he hadn’t finished paying for yet. The nomination that year went to Rutherford B. Hayes, as did the election, the latter event being the result of some heavy-handed ballot box stuffing in the South. Hayes wore a very full beard, even for the standards of the time, supported the high tariff on foreign manufactures, and would not allow the serving of alcoholic beverages at the White House, this being an edict from the First Lady, which led the newspapers to tag her with that most alliterative of spousal sobriquets, Lemonade Lucy. She was the first First Lady to graduate from college and she never wore a beard, despite her obvious Republican leanings.

Times change, however, and by 1896 there was an entire generation of voters who had never known Lincoln and who were, quite frankly, getting tired of looking at politicians resembling the Voronezher Rebbe’s first cousin on his mother’s side. They wanted something new, fresh, and exciting; what they got was William McKinley, the last Civil War veteran to occupy the White House and a man who was the epitome of small town Republican virtues. He was clean-shaven, though; in fact, McKinley could shave his entire face with just two swipes of a straight razor without so much as slicing off a piece of his nose, a rare talent in those days and in these as well. McKinley was re-elected in 1900, making him the first clean-shaven man to win re-election since Andrew Jackson did it in 1832.

Even if he didn’t have the beard, McKinley wanted to emulate Lincoln, just like every other Republican president of that age, and in many ways, he succeeded. McKinley fought a successful war just like Lincoln did, had a sick wife just like Lincoln did, and was shot just like Lincoln was. McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, also set a precedent; he was the first clean-shaven presidential assassin.

McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, had a mustache, as did William Howard Taft, who followed T.R. into the White House in 1908. This gave many old-fashioned Republican stalwarts hope that there would be many a hirsute presidency to come, but alas, this was not to be. In 1912, Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican Party, permitting the election of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, erstwhile college president, governor of New Jersey, where he tried to give that state’s traditionally gutter politics a high moral tone, and a profoundly clean-shaven man who made no attempt to pander to the bearded vote whatsoever. What’s more, he made the country like him, even if he hadn’t so much as a milk mustache, and he made the fashion stick. In 1916, Wilson ran against Charles Evans Hughes, who sported a very stylish beard, and whom the viciously partisan Democratic press immediately dubbed the Bearded Lady, setting a new low in political and personal mudslinging. Since 1916, only Thomas Dewey tried to run for President with a mustache, despite the insistence of his political advisers that the mustache had to go. Dewey insisted on keeping it; his wife like the mustache, he told his advisers, and that was good enough reason for him. He lost both times.

And so it is that a great American tradition has fallen into abeyance, the victim of tonsorial trends beyond the control of any one political party. Still, there is hope; everything old is new again, as the saying goes, and sooner or later the presidential face will bear hair once again, and all good and true Republicans will be happy, unless the President in question is a Democrat, wherein the beard is a sign of profoundly left-wing socio-political tendencies bordering on the near Bolshevistic in intensity. I mean, really, has anyone seen a picture of Hilary in the morning? I thought not.

The Vice President

The Vice President is chosen by lottery. Even s/he doesn't know who the Vice President is. Beards are not required in order to hold this office.

The Cabinet and Their Bureaucracies

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The Illuminati

Main article: Illuminati

The Illuminati have installed spy cameras in dollar bills to pursue their mission of "watching world events unfold."

Established in Article 0 of the Constitution, the Illuminati oversee all exercise of all power in the nation, silently watching world events unfold, and occasionally tugging on the strings. We despise their oversight, but cannot rid ourselves, lest we become unable to complete Hari Seldon's plan to reestablish a galactic empire.

The Judicial Branch

Article III of the Constitution establishes a Supreme Court and give Congress the power to decide its composition and to establish junior appellate courts inferior and afraid of the Supreme court. The Supreme Court is the final court in the nation and thus has the power to set precedent. In order to protect the independence of the judiciary, Judges serve as long as they wish upon a star, and not a moment longer, provided they commit no crime and do not have angry conservative lawmakers place a bounty on their head.

The Supreme Court also has the power to decide the constitutionality of laws. Though the Constitution does not explicitly give the Supreme Court the power to interpret the Constitution, in the landmark case of Marbury v. Power-Grab the Court interpreted the Constitution to give itself the power to interpret the Constitution.

Kevin Bacon

Kevin Bacon's power derives both from his role in ascertaining whether something connects to him, and in his ability to form new connections through his activities. In fact this is largely how Federal power has been expanded. For the first 150 years that the United States existed, the courts severely limited federal power, but as part of the progressive movement and the New Deal, Kevin Bacon engaged in a variety of activities designed to expand federal jurisdiction by connecting himself to various things.

But Has Kevin Bacon Been Alive Since the Founding?

Why, of course! Because Kevin Bacon is now a vital part of the functioning government, he must always have had that role. Any other conclusion would be CrimeThink.

This page was originally sporked from wikipedia.