Maybe you came across this. How did they deal with split legislatures prior to the 17th?
ping a ling a ling
As much trouble as the original senate selection process was, what we have now is infinitely worse.
What’s the difference? Article after article and Amendment after Amendment of the US Constitution is being used as toilet paper by Obama and the statists now anyway that it doesn’t matter.
At this point I think we’d be better off even if split legislatures were to pick one from both parties.
However, selling the idea of taking people’s vote for senator away is an incredibly high hurdle. Last summer Pete Hoekstra made the comment that he would like to get rid of the 17th amendment and the democrats went rabid screeching about him wanting to TAKE YOUR VOTE AWAY!!!!
You might be able to convince people to vote for senators by congressional district and the one who takes the most districts wins. You might actually be able to sell that if you can show how it puts control back into the hands of the individual states.
There is no provision in the Constitution to de-ratify an amendment. A vote for ratification is a vote for ratification. No do-overs.
When Amnesty is passed, it's over.
31 Questions and Answers about
the Internal Revenue Service
http://www.supremelaw.org/sls/31answers.htm
The Law That Never Was [16th Amendment]
After an extensive year-long nationwide research project, William J. Benson discovered that the 16th Amendment was not ratified by the requisite three-fourths of the states and that nevertheless Secretary of State Philander Knox had fraudulently declared ratification.
It was a shocking revelation; it reached deep to the core of our American system of government.
http://www.thelawthatneverwas.com/
16th bad, 17th bad, 18th bad ....... hmmm, how badly do I want to make female Freepers angry? Actually, they are the ones who give me hope that the 19th isn’t all bad. There just aren’t enough of them.
“In 1899 problems in electing a senator in Delaware became so acute that the state legislature did not send a senator to Washington for four years.”
This is a bad thing? - had that stalemate continued but another 70 years, we wouldn’t have that idiot Joe Biden to put up with today.
But seriously, of the many reforms we’d need to restore the original genius of our constitutional republic, these two would be among the most consequential.
Given the wording of Article V, the above scenario may be constitutional.
However...
The problem is that all three branches of the federal government are corrupt, and I can see pro-unconstitutionally big federal government activist justices ultimately giving the vote to ratify repeal of 16 and 17 to low-information voters who would be misguided to not repeal these amendments. What am I overlooking?
However again...
Regarding state legislature control of the Senate, I think that at least one state has proposed letting state lawmakers pick the candidates from whom voters will choose their state's federal senators. And since it is well known that the corrupt media chooses political candidates from out of nowhere anyway, I don't see anything unconstitutional about state lawmakers selecting Senate candidates from which voters will elect their state's federal senators.
And when state legislatures regain control of the federal Senate, then senators can block bills from the HoR which ignore Justice John Marshall's clarification that the states are prohibited from laying taxes in the name of state power issues, essentially any issue which Congress cannot justify under its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers.
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." --Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
I doubt that the US senate would ever agree to repealing the 16th, or more to the point, the 17th Amendment, so I devised an end-around, with a new amendment.
It would address a litany of problems with the federal government in all three branches, executive, legislative, and judicial, as well as reigning in the federal bureaucracy.
It does this by creating a body that is similar in composition to the senate, but is composed of 100 state appointed judges. It is the Second Court of the United States. It is superior to the US courts of appeal, but it is inferior to the SCOTUS.
Importantly, it is *not* a federal court, and does *not* decide the constitutionality of cases appealed to it; but instead, it decides the ultimate *jurisdiction* of the cases, whether they are indeed federal cases, or whether they should be returned to the states for decision.
Right now there is a terrible bottleneck of appellate cases, some 8,000 a year, sent to the SCOTUS, which can only hear a few dozen. So the rest of them revert to the decisions of the appellate courts.
In practical terms, this would give the states the final say in countless federal criminal and civil trials. This means that the efforts of decades of activist federal judges would be overturned as “not your (federal) business.”
The Second Court of the United States would also have an original jurisdiction for all lawsuits between the states and the federal government. Right now, if Holder sues Arizona to overturn a law he doesn’t like, it has to go through several layers of federal judges, taking years. And those judges are inclined to support the federal prerogatives, not those of the states.
This would change that. If Arizona sued Holder, the case would go right to the Second Court, and it would be up to the *states* to determine who wins. And yes, Holder can still appeal to the SCOTUS, but they don’t have to take the case.
From that point on, if the federal bureaucracy made itself obnoxious to the states, they could sue it, and let the other states decide if it was being oppressive.
It would finally be a federal government pruning mechanism.
The chances of this happening are considerably south of slim and none.
I am quite skeptical that appointing Senators would change much of anything for Conservatives.
The last 25 years have seen betrayal after betrayal by alleged Republican Senators.
Why should I believe that state legislators will do a better job of finding real Conservatives?
But the 17th? Are you mad? The only thing worse than letting my fellow Massholes choose Massachusetts's senators would to let the Massachusetts legislature do it!