1913 Was a Very Bad Year (16nth & 17nth amendments)

http://www.americanthinker.com ^ | 08/08/2010 | JB Williams

[wolfcreek]

The last Progressive surge is still under way.

[Outlaw Woman]

That makes alot of sense. Thank you...I’m thinking that I need to get refreshed on the Constitution. It was an absolute requirement for graduation when I was in high school...including the Declaration of Independence but now, I’d like to revisit it. Mark Levin has been advertising some sort of free course by Hillsdale...need to look into that.

But back to the 17th, there must be other benefits/reasons as well...

What is interesting about this though is that the states have to ratify a constitutional amendment. How did these amendments get through at that time??

[ALPAPilot]

They already have that power but never use it. The standard for impeaching Federal Judges is far less than Executive Officers.

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during GOOD BEHAVIOR

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

It take only a simple majority in the House

The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

But 2/3's in the Senate

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

[ALPAPilot]

The original reason for the choosing of Senators had to do with State Sovereignty. Representatives were to be chosen by the people who would be represented in the lower house. Senators would be chosen by the State Legislators to represent the interests of the State Governments. Some, like James Wilson, one of the founders from Pennsylvania, thought this quite undemocratic and opposed it.

Presumably, Senators would be much less inclined to violate the 10th amendment and thereby stepping on the tows of the state governments. Health Care mandates and Immigration are two such problems that would have different dynamics. So would most of the unfunded mandates that come down from Washington.

It’s far from a Panacea, but these amendments coincide with the beginning of huge federal government expansion.

[semantic]

Why do you think the amendments were enacted? It took decades of manovering by certain money interests to pull off the final solution.

I'm constantly amazed at the lack of cognition exhibited @ FR. Here's how the entire process went down, starting from square one:

• Democracies are an automatic fail. No and, if or but. Therefore, the absolute, number one objective of any corrupting force is to corrode a republic by the slow process of increasing enfranchisement.

• Once the voting franchise is extended over a broader base, by definition, one would have enabled those less capable of providing for themselves. It only takes one chink; thereafter, successive efforts to expand the franchise would become unstoppable.

• Once a core threshold was established, then it would be comparatively child's play to eventually reach the point where both populists initiatives could be passed **and** straight forward money influence as in the case of the Fed.

• After this framework was completed, the course was set on auto-pilot. There is simply nothing that can be done to prevent the expansion of government & the increased indebtedness that accompanies such expansion. The beauty of the scheme is that taxes are increased over time to pay for the government debt obligations to the private parties that put the whole thing into play.

  It is fatal to view these events as a series of "unfortunate" or "misguided", sincere mistakes. It was a total piece of cake. Put yourself in the same situation, knowing what you know now. If you wanted to take complete power over a well run nation, what would you do? The sure fire technique is to establish a democracy. Do that, and watch the power & money roll in.

  Now they are up to $trillions, and still without any recrimination or prosecution at all. It is so blatant it is almost breathtaking. And yet the sheep still baahh as they are being repeated sheared.

[algernonpj]

Re:"I ain’t the biggest Bush fan but both were Americans"

They are both globalists. To them America is here to serve the globalists agenda. The war that is bankrupting us is meant to prop up the global infrastructure which include Arab royalty. They did nothing to provide America with security. They let Mexicans run wild in America. Bush enforced Kosovo partition from Serbia. Bush funded military support of the Muslim Lebanese Army.

Laura, who was idolized by republicans as a classy lady, is now out promoting homosexual marriage and illegal immigrant amnesty. Oh about Bush fixing home lending, he could have done a lot more with executive orders in lieu of simple lip service.

Thanks, saved me from posting it. Not only could GW have issued an EO (which is how DHS was started), he had a republican congress for 6 of 8 Years. He could have spent the energy on the pending mortgage crisis instead of trying to foist amnesty for illegal aliens in the US.

[Pardeeville Liberator]

The state legislative selection of Senators is in essence the same as the Electoral College selecting of the president. We would in many cases eliminate the popular vote of the big cities.

[meyer]

We would in many cases eliminate the popular vote of the big cities.

I don't know about that, but I know that we would counter the massive voter fraud that occurs in some of those big cities. In some places, it's pretty easy to drive from precinct to precinct voting in the name of the newly deceased. Especially where no voter ID is required, and where precinct workers are sympathetic to the cause (can you say "democRAT" - I knew you could).

[Para-Ord.45]

Almost 100 years and the “progressives” aka regressives are STILL on the march.

Frankly, I see no way to turn things around and return to a Constitutional Republic short of a revolution where all “progressives” are arrested and summarily tried and shot. The odds of that happening are nil, the cancer is in too deep.

[Political Junkie Too]

Can someone, who has studied the 17th amendment, explain the benefits of the state legislators choosing Senators instead of the citizens of that state?

You should read the scholarly papers by Todd Zywicki in this thread, Repealing the Seventeenth Amendment, especially this one. It lays out the common reasons why the 17th passed, and then tries to disprove them by pointing out incongruities in the arguments, and then finally explains a market within the Senate for trading political votes based on longevity (the ability to back up the promise of future votes due to the guarantee of being there).

You might even think of this as the foundation for the creation of the Ruling Class as depicted in this lengthy essay.

The bottom line is that the original system wasn't corrupt enough, which is why the 17th was passed -- to give Senators (as power brokers) the ability to promise to deliver legislation because of the guarantee of remaining in the Senate long enough to make good on trades for votes.

-PJ

[Political Junkie Too]

Sorry, it looks like the link in my post went bad. Here is the good link.

Repealing the Seventeenth Amendment

-PJ

[Outlaw Woman]

Thank you for that. That makes it even more clear in my mind. In fact, it is now crystal clear and considering this, the 17th should be repealed which we know will never happen. This is by far the best outline of the reasoning.

Thanks again AP

[Outlaw Woman]

Fantastic. Thank you so much for the reference link(s). You know, I was thinking about this all day while driving, and rememberd that when I was in high school, we went through the entire constitution and the declaration...this was in 1975-76. Anyway, at that time though, when things were taught the majority of the students took it as gospel from the teacher and the textbooks. That is to say that not a lot of questioning went on about the ‘nuances’ of each amendment or the intent of the Declaration. We just took it at face value and never questioned ‘why’. So it wasn’t preented in ‘context’ or thought out to what some of these amendments actually did. I can see now though just how damaging the 17th amendment was/is.

Thanks again PJ.

[The Truth Will Make You Free]

The writer states "It's hard to imagine how the aforementioned amendment could have been written any broader, or why 36 states would agree to such an open ended federal power to strip citizens of their rightful earnings via taxation without representation and with literally no boundaries or limits to how far the federal government could ultimately go in their effort to buy the votes of some with the assets of others."

The rest of the story... It was a direct result of the Prohibition Moverment! From Smithsonian Magazine Wayne B. Wheeler: The Man Who Turned Off the Taps:

But in its scope, Prohibition was much, much more complicated than that, initiating a series of innovations and alterations revolutionary in their impact. The men and women of the temperance movement created a template for political activism that is still followed a century later. They also abetted the creation of a radical new system of federal taxation, lashed their domestic goals to the conduct of World War I and carried female suffrage to the brink of passage. ...

The ASL’s state-by-state campaign was reasonably effective, particularly in the South. But in 1913, two events led the organization to adopt a new strategy. First, Congress overrode President William Howard Taft’s veto of something called the Webb-Kenyon Act, which outlawed the importation of alcoholic beverages into a dry state. The stunning 246 to 95 override vote in the House of Representatives showed not just the power of the anti-liquor forces but also how broadly representative they had become.

The override was followed by enactment of a national income tax authorized by the recently ratified 16th Amendment. Until 1913, the federal government had depended on liquor taxes for as much as 40 percent of its annual revenue. “The chief cry against national Prohibition,” the ASL’s executive committee said in a policy statement that April, “has been that the government must have the revenue.” But with an income tax replacing the levy on liquor, that argument evaporated, and the ASL could move beyond its piecemeal approach and declare its new goal: “National Prohibition, [to] be secured through the adoption of a Constitutional Amendment.”

[infowarrior]

Woodrow Wilson’s legacy.

Question... House much influence did "Colonel" House have in all this? From what I've been given to understand, he was the puppetmaster, and Wilson merely his puppet...

the infowarrior

[CPT Clay]

Bookmark for a very good article.

[CPT Clay]

Thanks I wasnt aware of the Pendleton Act.

You are correct sir.

[listenhillary]

Senators were representing the state’s interests and stood against encroachment of the federal government on states rights.

Senators now can simply buy the peoples votes with redistributed wealth.

[Palter]

The author of the article implies it was all Dem's fault for the 16th and 17th.

The 16th was pushed by Taft(R) and passed by majority GOP house and senate at the time.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

Having Senators chosen by state legislators would make contributions to Senate campaigns a thing of the past.

Conversely, it made it far easier for someone who wanted to be a senator to make a few key bribes to state legislators in order to win his seat. There were a number of scandals of that sort in the years between the Civil War and the passage of the 17th. A journalist named David Graham Phillips wrote a series of articles entitled "The Treason of the Senate" that ran in the Hearst Press that exposed the corruption of the institution as it stood.

Meanwhile, states had been deciding on their own to go to a direct election model for decades, and by the time the 17th came up for a vote, the majority of states had already instituted some form of it.