Posted on 11/17/2017 5:51:31 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
With less than a month to go before Alabama’s special election to fill the Senate seat left vacant by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Republican candidate Roy Moore refuses to quit the race amid fallout over credible allegations of sexual assault dating from the 1970s, including that he initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32.
Some polls still show Moore leading his Democratic opponent Doug Jones, while a poll conducted by the National Republican Senate Committee earlier this week shows Moore trailing Jones by 12 points.
Senate Republicans are calling on Moore to withdraw from the race, saying he’s “unfit to serve” and threatening not to seat him if he’s elected, but Moore isn’t backing down. His campaign has called the allegations a politically motivated “witch hunt” and Moore has vowed to stay in the race, which means there’s still a chance the people of Alabama might elect him to the U.S. Senate.
All of this could have been avoided if we’d just repealed the Seventeenth Amendment.
The Seventeenth Amendment says U.S. senators must be elected by popular vote, instead of by state legislatures. Adopted in 1913 during the height of the Progressive Era, the amendment supersedes the provisions in the Constitution that required senators to be elected by state legislatures.
The idea that state legislatures would elect senators might seem odd nowadays, but creating some distance between the popular vote and the election of senators was crucial to the Founders’ grand design for the republic. The original idea, spelled out in The Federalist Papers, was that the people would be represented in the House of Representatives and the states would be represented in the Senate. Seats in the House were therefore apportioned according to population while every state, no matter how large its populace, got two seats in the Senate.
The larger concept behind this difference was that Congress needed to be both national and federal in order to reflect not just the sovereignty of the people but also the sovereignty of the states against the federal government. In Federalist No. 62, James Madison explained that Congress shouldn’t pass laws “without the concurrence, first, of a majority of the people, and then of a majority of the states.”
Besides tempering the passions of the electorate, empowering state legislatures to elect senators was meant to protect the states from the encroachments of the federal government. The tension was (and still is) between the dual sovereignty of the national government and the states. Writing in Federalist No. 39, Madison explains that while the House of Representatives is national because it “will derive its powers from the people of America,” the Senate “will derive its powers from the States, as political and coequal societies.” We’ve lost much of this today, but the jurisdiction of the federal government, wrote Madison, “extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.”
The Founders were nearly unanimous in this view of dual sovereignty and why it necessitated the Senate be elected by state legislatures. Only one member of the Constitutional Convention, James Wilson, supported electing senators by popular vote. But it wasn’t long before the idea gained traction. The Seventeenth Amendment was first submitted to the Senate in 1826, amid the country’s first real wave of populism, which culminated in the election of President Andrew Jackson in 1828.
By the time the next big wave of populism swept America in the late nineteenth century, calls to amend the Constitution and elect senators by popular vote had grown much louder. When the House passed a joint resolution proposing an amendment for the election of senators in 1911, it was part of a populist anti-corruption movement that included among its prominent supporters William Jennings Bryan, who as secretary of state certified the amendment after 36 states ratified it in May 1913.
The chief argument in favor of it was that Gilded Age industrial monopolies like Standard Oil exerted too much control over state legislatures, and hence too much control over the U.S. Senate. To be sure, late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century state legislatures were notoriously corrupt. At almost every level of government, rank corruption and machine politics was the norm. President Benjamin Harrison, elected in 1888, said upon learning that much of his support had been bought, “I could not name my own cabinet. They had sold out every position in the cabinet to pay the expenses.” In 1897, Mark Twain famously quipped, “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.”
The populist fervor during this time shouldn’t be overstated, though. Ironically, the Seventeenth Amendment, which was purportedly about giving the people a greater voice in government, was passed seven years before the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave half the country (women) the right to vote. And, of course, Jim Crow laws in the South continued to suppress the votes of blacks and poor whites.
But we’re no longer living in the era of late-nineteenth-century industrial monopolies. While government corruption was in many ways codified by the New Deal, we also no longer face the same kind of rank corruption as that in the Gilded Age.
It’s time, in other words, to reconsider the Seventeenth Amendment. Given our current wave of populism, it might be wise to reintroduce some of those old ideas about federalism, and temper the passions of the electorate by letting states, not the people, elect senators.
After all, it’s not like the Seventeenth Amendment has reformed the Senate into a serious deliberative body that responds to the wishes of the people. Were it not for the Seventeenth Amendment, we might have never had Strom Thurmond hang around the Senate for 48 years, serving until he was 100 years old. We might not have had former KKK Grand Wizard Robert Byrd serve for 51 years. We might have even escaped the scurrilous and corrupt Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, also a prominent Klansman, who once said “Once a Ku Klux, always a Ku Klux.” And who knows, after Chappaquiddick, the Massachusetts legislature might have picked someone other than Ted Kennedy to represent the state.
Of course, maybe we would have ended up with all those guys anyway. But there’s a decent chance at least some of them eventually would have been voted out by their state legislatures. Just like there’s a decent chance, were it not for the Seventeenth Amendment, we might not be facing the prospect of Senator Roy Moore of Alabama.
“which would make the 19th Amendment in particular an attack on the 10th Amendment”
Which is another solid reason to repeal it.
Thanks,
L
The 17th amendment should be repealed, but not because of Judge Moore.
RCP poll average as of today, Jones +0.2%
Politicians are scumbags. Letting a small number of scumbags pick Senators would be insane.
They sure as hell wouldn’t send many conservatives. Dems and RINOs would team up in most Republican states.
It would be nice in the case of this particular election, but it would cause many of it’s own debacles.
I am in agreement we should return to the original Constitution. Senators would once again be responsible to State legislators, and not be lone wolves. The longer I live the more convinced I am that the framers of the Constitution were empowered from above in the formation of this country and the writing of the Constitution. It is an amazing instrument. I am an octogenarian.
Think about the huge amount of money that will disappear from the system at election time. The media and special interests will fight it tooth and nail, which make the idea tastier.
While I don’t disagree with you that all politicians are whore and playthings, the lobbyist connection makes no sense.
At least Senators would not be beholden to voters, most of whom are dumb as bricks. And Senate races wouldn’t be popularity contests which elect men and women who are attractive or glamorous (e.g., Scott Brown or Kamala Harris). Electing people merely because they are attractive should be limited to the House of Representatives.
No thank you.
Let the people decide
“Please post your view of the effects of the 19th Amendment.”
A death sentence for the republic.
You have it backwards. Pre-17th the State Senators were chosen by whatever means the State wanted. Direct Election, indirect election (buy district), chosen by the governor with advice and consent of the state house, nomination by the state house with approval of the governor via veto and non-veto and the State houses having the ability to override vetoes.
The primary reason for the 17th was Corruption through Cronyism — particularly in Governor appointed Senators.
Well we still have corruption and cronyism with our direct election method but also allowing other state residents to give campaign donations to out of State Senators is also a travesty. Skewing the Senate towards the bigger, well populated and concentration of wealth.
If they just passed a law that no out of state money and make it absolute — multi state pacs forbidden, no changing what you are once filed and put the onus of verifying the legitimacy of a donor on the Candidate with anywhere from censure to automatic impeachment as penalties for not performing the duty verifying the donation legitimacy.
How could State legislators be more corrupt than the system we now have whereby special interests call the shots. Some of those senators probably don’t go the bathroom without getting permission from one of their supporters.IMO
What evidence was there of cronyism prior to the Seventeenth? It’s one thing to assert it, but yet another to prove it.
Now after the Seventeenth, cronyism is rampant. And the state governments completely lost their representation in DC, and power gets centralized in DC. And again, the Senate has become instead a place for foreign governments to exert influence over the federal government, something that was never intended by the Founding Fathers.
“Yeah right,
So we can give a free check to Mitch McConnell and let him choose?
Or give any other group of people already in the senate the power to keep and protect their status quo?
Elections are about change. If we are displeased with the current power structure in the senate we vote and change it,
So to the author of this article: No! Heck No!”
Repeal of the 17th would return selection of a State’s U.S. Senator to adhere to the selection process specified in Constitution of that State. Prior to enactment of the 17th Amendment, States had multiple methods to their State’s U.S. Senator selection.
Some States had their Senator appointed by the Governor or selected by the State House of Representatives – these were the most common methods of selection. Some States had provisions for immediate recalls of a State‘s U.S. Senator which ensured State interest were represented in the Federal Government.
The selling point to Repeal of 17th would return control of the U.S. Senate to the State as prescribed by our Founding Fathers.
The word they should be using is uncorroboratable.
Then the rest of the article flows.
-PJ
What was it for Hillary before November 8?
ok. So let's 86 the 17th. But, before we do, with politics as usual, how do we prevent the same old same old corruption that was the trigger to write the 17th and that exists on every level of government now?
RCP average for the National popular vote, Clinton +3.3.
Actual Result with Cali fraud included, Clinton +2.1
Polling was not actually off by much at all. State polling was pretty accurate too, except for Wisconsin which was underpolled. Most were within the margin of error. It was expectations that were so heavily biased in favor of Clinton, not polling.
Maybe Moore is actually up by as much as up 2 or 3. It should be 15-20.
It’s the “States OR the people” but otherwise I don’t disagree. Most people don’t really pay much attention to the 10th amendment and that inattention is rather sad.
I would say clinton got between 10-15 million illegal and fraudulent votes. Subtract those votes and the Billions of dollars in free advertising from the leftist propaganda media and Trump would have won every state.
The polling was crap.
Please explain why that is so.
the judiciary has hampered this in order to control the courts, and restrain the people from “indicting’ corruption. If Grand Juries were able to make investigations and presentments without kowtowing to prosecuters, Hillary an Bill would be in jail by now and Obama's birth could have been investigated instead of dead ended by findings of no standing...
Grand Juries are supposed to be the peoples tool to stop corruption...why is it considered "obsolete"? we need to start a movement to follow the Constitution and return power to the people and lock all these crooks up.see runaway grand juries..
http://www.constitution.org/lrev/roots/runaway.htm
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