"The Senate Nuisance — Abolish It!" (1915)
Debs: not a fan of the "world's great deliberative body."
Talk about Nero fiddling while Rome was burning! Have you been watching the antics of the senate of the United States lately?
What is your honest opinion now of this highest deliberative body in the world”?
For weeks this bunch of burnt-out corporation humpty-dumpties have been sawing away at the “administration shipping bill.”
Do you have the least idea what it’s all about?
While these old senatorial stiffs are cavorting about the senate chamber and alternating their moving picture performance by posing for the delectation of the lorgnetted Lulus in the gallery, millions of workingmen and women are idle and children by thousands are verging on starvation.
And what are these hand-picked wind-jammers doing about it?
What do they care about it?
The senate is the diseased vermiform appendix of the decadent political state of capitalism.
There is no more need of it than there is for a tail to an oyster or a wart to a clam.
The senate was intended for the time it was conceived to defeat democracy and thwart the will of the people.
Senatorial courtesy? Do you know what it means? Simply that the people are still a lot of double-eared asses or they wouldn’t stand five minutes for that gang of political confidence artists masquerading as the United States senate.
Under their senatorial courtesy rules one of these galvanized corporation tomtits can paralyze proceedings ad infinitum — jam wind nigh and day until he has to be carted away to his m[e]nagerie — and no one can interfere with him and that’s what they call senatorial courtesy — while the people they are suffered to represent and who keep them in luxury are starving to death.
A couple of husky hoboes ought to turn the hose on the bunch and sweep them into the Potomac where they might display their senatorial courtesy and talk themselves to death.
The United States senate is an unmitigated nuisance that ought to be suppressed the same as any other plague or pestilence.
Every vote cast for a republican, democrat or progressive ticket is cast for the senate and its disgraceful disgusting and perfidious performance.
The Socialist party is the only party that stands dead against the United States senate and the rotten political state of capitalism of which it is the degenerate tool.