Success Quote by John Jay Hooker

Preposterous is doing a lot of work here, because John Jay Hooker isn’t really offering a civics lesson so much as filing an indictment. The line frames constitutional failure as something too obvious to be accidental: if the Senate has spent 200-plus years not doing what the document “says,” then either senators are willfully ignoring plain instructions or the institution has evolved into a machine that rewards selective reading. Hooker’s businessman bluntness lands like a boardroom rebuke: this is not a subtle interpretive dispute, it’s basic competency - read the contract, follow the terms.

The rhetoric depends on a calculated naivete. “Read the Constitution and do what it says” pretends the text is self-executing and unambiguous, a kind of instruction manual misfiled under politics. That simplification is the point. By collapsing complex constitutional interpretation into common sense, Hooker turns legal nuance into an alibi and paints senators as either lazy, corrupt, or captured by incentives that make obedience irrational.

The 200-year sweep matters because it converts a partisan gripe into an institutional critique. It suggests continuity of failure across parties, wars, amendments, and eras - a long pattern of convenience over constraint. In a culture where “constitutional” is often a brand stamp rather than a discipline, Hooker’s jab exposes how appeals to the founding document can mask discretionary power. He’s not arguing that the Senate misunderstands the Constitution; he’s implying it understands perfectly well and proceeds anyway.