Repeal the 17th Amendment!

America, we’re told from a young age, is all about democracy, and democracy is all about choosing whom you want to be your representatives and holding them accountable. This seems like an entirely uncontroversial idea, but a surprising number of Republican politicians would like to do away with this right, and return the country to an older era when Americans didn’t directly elect their representatives in Washington.

Until 1913 and the ratification of the 17th Amendment, Americans didn’t actually elect senators, state legislators did. The change seems unquestionably positive, but Rep. Jeff Flake, the front-runner for the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in Arizona, said this week when asked about repeal,”I think it’s better as it reinforces the notion of federalism to have senators appointed by state legislatures.” After he caught some flak for the remark, a spokesperson clarified, “As a supporter of the principle of federalism, Jeff Flake believes that the Framers of the Constitution gave state legislatures the power to appoint U.S. senators for good reason. However, he has not called for the repeal of the 17th Amendment.”

Rep. Todd Akin, who recently won a Republican Senate primary in Missouri and will face off against Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, said in May, “I have a very serious concern about erosion of states’ rights, and reversing this [17th Amendment] might pull that balance back.” He said he was “leaning” in favor of repeal. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the Republican nominee in Michigan running against Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, said recently when asked about repealing the amendment, “I think that would be a positive thing.” “The direct election of U.S. senators made the U.S. Senate act and behave like the House of Representatives. The end result has led to an erosion of states’ rights,” Hoekstra said in November. Richard Mourdock, who recently ousted longtime Republican Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar in a GOP primary, agrees. “You know the issue of the 17th Amendment is so troubling to me … The Senate was there to represent the states. In other words, the government of the states,” Mourdock said in May.

This goes back a couple of years now. Sen. Mike Lee, the Ivy League-educated Tea Party judicial mastermind from Utah, told CNN in 2010 that “the 17th Amendment was a mistake.” Texas Gov. Rick Perry also called the amendment “mistaken,” as did Rep. Paul Broun, a Republican from Georgia. Even conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in 2010, “I would change it back to what they wrote, in some respects. The 17th Amendment has changed things enormously … [Y]ou can trace the decline of so-called states’ rights throughout the rest of the 20th century.” Alaska’s 2010 Republican nominee Joe Miller and perennial GOP candidate Alan Keyes have also signed on to the cause.

Why would anyone want to take away people’s rights to elect their senators? Repealing the 17th Amendment has long been a hobbyhorse of the fringe right, but the Tea Party and Paulite libertarians popularized it, along with their fetishization of a revisionist view of the Founders and states’ rights. The idea is that if state legislators elect senators, Congress will be responsive to the needs of state governments, and thus preserve states’ rights and prerogatives. As with many right-wing ideas that emerged from the fringe, this one appears to have started with the John Birch Society. As Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum wrote in 2011, when Perry was getting attention for his anti-17th Amendment views, “it’s popped up periodically on the fringe of movement conservatism ever since. In the 80s, W. Cleon Skousen, a big early influence on the JBS and later a big influence on Glenn Beck, began pitching repeal of the 17th Amendment again, and a few years after that Ron Paul took up the banner. Former Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia introduced a bill in 2004 to repeal the amendment, and in 2009 repeal became a talking point among the Tea Party crowd.”

Beyond states’ rights and glorification of the past that didn’t exist, the opposition to the amendment may tap into the same notion that drives some support for restrictive voting laws and suggestions that people who don’t pay taxes or who receive government assistance are somehow not full citizens.

But repealing the 17th Amendment would be far worse than merely undemocratic. In fact, democracy wasn’t the main motivation behind the amendment at all; corruption was. If you think campaign finance is bad now, image how much easier it is to buy an election when you only have to reach a handful of state legislators instead of an entire state’s electorate. Lewis Gould, a history professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin who wrote a book about the Senate in the 20th century, told Salon that by the turn of the century, there was a “stench in the nostrils” of many Americans about how senators were elected. “It was much easier to manipulate and much cheaper — the cost per vote was much smaller,” he explained.

The Senate developed such a bad reputation that a popular fable had it that President Grover Cleveland’s wife woke him up in the middle of the night to alert him that there were “robbers in the house.” To that, a sleepy Cleveland replied, “I think you are mistaken. There are no robbers in the House, but there are plenty in the Senate.” Sen. William Frye from Maine wrote to a friend in 1889, “You do not believe that a man should buy a United States Senatorship, nor do I, yet there are several in our distinguished body who hold their seats by purchase.”

The Senate’s official historical office notes:

Intimidation and bribery marked some of the states’ selection of senators. Nine bribery cases were brought before the Senate between 1866 and 1906. In addition, forty-five deadlocks occurred in twenty states between 1891 and 1905, resulting in numerous delays in seating senators. In 1899, problems in electing a senator in Delaware were so acute that the state legislature did not send a senator to Washington for four years.

Gould said the corruption sometimes took on a “comic opera” tone. “For every Lincoln-Douglass debate, you get some more sordid characters where there was talk about legislators being bribed, or being found with women, or being drunk and voting when they’re hung over, all sorts of things.” “There was one case in New York where they were having a Senate election in ‘81 and group of legislators were sent to the wrong room and they looked over the transom and saw one of the candidates with what was called an ‘unspeakable woman’ — that the end of his hopes for being reelected to the Senate,” Gould added.

Interestingly, Maryland didn’t officially ratify the 17th Amendment until April of 2012.

The 17th has its flaws but you are correct that either can be corrupted.

But the biggest corruption is one almost nobody bothers to mention, and that was the artificial limiting of the number of representatives to 435 in 1911 which destroyed representative democracy.

Article 1 Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution states that the number of representatives for a state shall not exceed one per 30,000. Over the years as the population of the United States grew so did the size of the House of Representatives to account for the increase in population. As population grew this ratio was diluted until in 1911 the number of representatives was frozen at the current 435.

By 1911 when the US population was roughly 92 million the representative ratio had ballooned to 1 representative per 200,000 population. With the number of House seats fixed and the population continuing to grow, today that ratio is 1 representative to almost 700,000 population. This erosion of the power of representation is a subtle and pernicious form of tyranny as the purpose of the House was to make the Federal Government accountable to We the People. Monetary inflation reduces the purchasing power of yours dollar, but representative inflation reduces the value of your vote, and that has far wider ranging effect.

Rather than trying to repeal the 17th, which isn't going to happen, we should be arguing for a new amendment to vastly increase the number of House seats to restore something approaching the sort of representative ratios intended by the founders. One representative per 50,000 population would expand the House to over 6,000 seats based on 2010 census numbers.

Such a move would instantly force power to be decentralized away from the Federal government because it would only be possible to get consensus in the House for legislation of truly national importance, as the founders intended. It would also be much more difficult for representatives to "stay bought" as they would be accountable to much smaller districts which would make long political "careers" much rarer. The reason you have the sort of systemic corruption is that it takes millions to run a House campaign to sway 700K people in the typical district. By contrast at a 50,000-to-1 ratio running for Congress would be more akin to running for mayor of a small city, and the lower "barriers to entry" would mean that selling out to power brokers would be less of a requirement to get elected.

Restore true representation and much of the distant bureaucracy of the current Federal system would wither.

“I’m very aware of the pre-17th corruption. I’ve just gotten quite tired of the small group of FReepers that champion this boneheaded notion of repeal that as soon as I see anything with a title as such, it gets a swift rebuke from me.”

Its not possible retain any form of federalism without the Senate serving its original capacities of advocating for & defending the States on every judicial & officer nomminite as well as on every law.

I won’t claim that even the senate as Madison designed it was fully effective, the Hamiltonian notion of gentlemen senators(thus 6 year terms) was I think erroneous and detracted from the accountability of said senators(as designed) to the corruption of Washington and detriment of separation of powers.

In any-event what we have had sense 1913 was almost completely ineffective in retaining any shred of federalism. Not only has the new redundant house of reps been deprived almost every last shred of its critical constitutional function by the 17th. The corruption issue has instead of being resudeded by the change has instead been amplified many times over.

I'm for enlarging the size of the House. I'm surprised so many freepers seem to respond favorably to the idea since the downside is you'd essentially have a bigger federal government by creating a bunch of new leeches on the government payroll and more federal bureaucrats, but most freepers seem in agreement with me.

The reason why the positives outweigh the negatives is most Americans right now (probably 70-80% of us, I'd say) are completely ignored by "our" Congressman because they don't need our votes. Even if every district was competitive, there's no way a single politician can adequately serve the needs of 650,000+ citizens (I forgot what the number was after the latest census, but it's well over half a million people), and don't even try to reach out to all parts of their district. It's a crime that in IL-2, for example, Jesse Jackson Jr. and Robin Kelly could completely write off 2 out of 3 counties in their district (Will & Kankakee), but win re-election overwhelmingly solely by appealing to their base in Crook County. The founders certainly didn't have that in mind when they created the House.

The other thing is the House of Representatives was designed to regularly grow as the population of the country grew. I have no idea why they fixed the number at 435 in 1911, it made no sense at the time and the population of this country has changed drastically since then. It makes no logical sense for a country of 300+ million people to only get 435 representatives. It's very hard to get back the 1 congressmen per every 30,000 people that they had in 1789 or whatever, because you'd need thousands of Congressmen to do that now. The thought of 6000 congressmen is scary (I think China has something like 4000 with their population of 1+ billion), I think Fieldmarshaldj said you'd have something like 75 Maxine Waters representing L.A., but at the very lease, they need to increase the number of congressmen by at least 100, and probably more.

Even if we had 6000, the crooked politicians would probably STILL ensure I had no representation by putting my little suburban town in a Congressional district with some nearby poor Chicago neighborhood. To really reform Congress so people get actual REPRESENTATION in the federal government, you'd need three major reforms:

1) Greatly enlarge the size of the House, resulting in smaller districts with less constituents (it has to say UNDER 500,000 people at the least... ideally it would 100,000-200,000, if you ask me)

2) Eliminate gerrymandering so all districts are draw by an impartial computer designed to make the districts as compact as possible and keep communities TOGETHER whenever possible... NO more "1/4th of this town gets gerrymandered into another county on other end of the state"

3) ONLY U.S. citizens are counted for the purposes of representation. Illegal aliens count as 0/5th of a person, sorry California, you're going to lose several Congressmen. It doesn't matter if 800,000 people physically "live" in the district, if only 50,000 of them have citizenship, that's who is given representation. Enlarge the district and add for citizens if it's a large immigrant area.

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