Posted on 08/03/2010 6:25:01 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
The kind of Republic the founders gave us was one that included the States (as in State of California). I guess you missed this post.
Bay, you are entirely correct and this was, I believe (calling in Publius) the reason the 17th passed.
But there is one element that persuades me towards repealing the 17th, and that is the way the feds control the states through grant monies. They dangle the money, the states take it, and thereafter are hooked -- they have to follow new diktats from DC or risk losing the money they've become accustomed to receiving.
And the new diktats are not harmless; in some cases I've been able to run the numbers to demonstrate that if the state adopted the new requirements it would cost the state more than the amount of lost funding.
I don't like seeing these kind of games. I believe (or at least hope?) giving the state direct representation in the senate would result in fewer such games.
Very interesting. Thanks!
Bay, I don't travel abroad THAT much and abroad I'm almost always with my German-speaking colleagues (they're the most open). In my last trip to Europe they were coming out of Obama-adoration, but I heard little more. Next month, though, could be different.
In any event, issues like the 17th Amendment will go right over their heads; they mostly like and admire America but they simply do not understand our political system and our complex system of checks and balances.
This is not to put them down. If we fully understood it we might not have ratified the 17th. And I can tell you that complex and less-than-precisely defined procedural regulations can cause the Germans as much difficulty as they cause us -- having been involved as the native English-speaker in a group effort to translate a German document defining one such into English.
My German colleagues believe, I think, that no matter what America will pull out of it.
But as an engineer I'd say: this fix simply didn't work and made things worse. Go back to the original, which we know is flawed, study it some and try something else.
You have said it well. The States provided an additional check on Federal government growth. Now they are non-participants. If you assume corruption, you still have a check. Corruption is what government is. The founders merely tried to slow it down.
If by "the states" you mean the people of the states, then there is no point to having a Senate, because the House already represents them. There is no point to having two houses of Congress that represent the same people. When the Constitution said "states" it referred to the sovereign state governments and it meant for these to be represented in the federal government. Popular election of the senate was a sneaky way of denying representation to any of the state governments so that the states couldn't fight to resist federal power expansion.
The Founders say in the Federalist Papers that the power of Congress was so great that its power had to be split into two houses representing different groups that would check each other. The House represented the People of the US and the Senate was supposed to represent the state governments. (This is why the Senate confirms ambassadors, judges, and treaties and the House has no say in these matters. Sovereign State governments understand the technicalities of these things much better than the average joe. Also, the reason that every state is equally represented in the Senate is to show that each sovereign state is equal.)
That is a great idea, but how would you prevent out of state groups from laundering out of state money by using front groups resident in the state. It's just like money laundering. Give your money to your in-state representative who then gives it to the candidate. The end result being the out-of-state interests still own the senators.
As you argued, the 17th amendment deprived the states as sovereign governments of their right to be represented in the federal government. The Constitution says that the Constitution cannot ever be amended to deprive a state of its equal representation in the Senate. By representing the people of the state, instead of the state itself, isn't that violating the Constitutions prohibition against amending the Constitution to deprive the state governments of their representation in the Senate, and therefore isn't the current method of selecting the senate theoretically unconstitutional?
We have a republic (i.e. a representative government), but it is a Democratic Republic not a federal republic anymore. Without state government representation in the government there is no federation...we have a unitary system where the states more resemble provinces rather than states.....we have a Democratic Republic that claims to be federal but doesn't act like one in practice at all.
People here can debate all they care to and cite Federalist Papers or whatever, but one other thing the founders intended beyond any doubt is that the constitution could be amended. And in this case it was, so the founders intent is 1,000% in tact with the 17th amendment.
And nothing will change my mind on this in today's political environment: I trust a vote of the people for US senators far more than I'd trust the members of any state legislature.
We have endless threads here about RINOs and about how Congress and Obama ignore the will of the people, and there is a lot of truth to all of that. But state legislators are no better, and giving them more power is not the answer to anything other than making the voters even less able to do something about a Congress that ignores the will of the people all too often.
I think the notion of allowing state legislatures to pick US senators in today's political environment is one of the dumbest ideas around, now matter what the founders envisioned in the 1790s.
I am in favor of this.
But you gotta remember that state legislatures are, if anything, more corrupt than Congress (a heck of an achievement). The solution, of course, is to play more attention to the state legislature. With small constituencies, they can be more easily influenced.
That was exactly my point. We have a fraudulent government because the 17th would have to have a 100% vote.
I should have used “Democratic Republic”. Certainly, it gives no check on the growth of the corruption in Washington. The original founders model was far better.
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