The 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution put the election of senators in the hands of the voters, instead of keeping it in the state legislatures, where the Founders had placed it. The amendment seemed like a good idea at the time, “with the best of intentions — what could possibly go wrong?”
A lot has.
The amendment torpedoed the wise intent of the Founders. Previously, senators had been elected by the legislatures of each state, and therefore were answerable to them. Unfortunately, a number of serious problems arose: primarily corruption, but also legislative deadlocks due to what we may call, “dirty politics,” similar to the fiasco we now see with the budget crisis. The attempt to resolve those problems, by allowing the general public to elect the senators, was the wrong solution. It not only failed to correct matters, but made them worse.
The Seventeenth Amendment made us less of a republic and more of a democracy, an effect that the Founders warned us would not turn out well. Current events dramatically prove them right.
Although it is illegal to bribe a member of Congress, bribery is done on a massive scale and in plain view, by a small number of multi-billionaires, thanks to the 17th. When members of Congress can be bribed on so massive a scale, we no longer have a republic; we have a kleptocracy.
This has been made painfully clear during the present budget crisis. Democrat senators, with few exceptions, will not vote to fund the government without massive spending increases for illegal aliens. Those senators are beholden to the leftist multi-billionaires who fund their re-election campaigns. Those billionaires are no friend of our republic, nor of our liberty. The senators, as it now stands, need not represent the interests of their respective states, but only of their unelected sponsors, their political “sugar daddies.” Their state governments have little or no control over them.
Needless to say, the Founders never intended this. They were well aware of the proclivity of men to do evil — indeed, they structured the entire federal government with that in mind — and part of that structure was that the senators would be controlled by the state governments, not by plebiscite.
It was not a good idea to change that. What went wrong is the senators no longer are directly answerable to their state governments. That may seem an obscure point, but it is at the heart of many of our national problems. It seems to have the virtue of being a democratic solution, but instead, it has showcased the reason why we were not founded as a republic and not a democracy.
Senators today are insulated from direct accountability. This is indeed a good idea for the House of Representatives, since its members directly represent the voters in their districts. It is a terrible idea for the Senate, since senators can now flagrantly ignore the very purpose of the Senate. What we now have is, in effect, two separate houses of representatives, without having solved the problems the 17th Amendment was supposed to solve. We still have corruption, and we still have deadlocks. Even though senators are elected by the public, those on the left are financed by, and largely controlled by, unelected billionaires who use them for their purposes, not ours.
Repeal of the 17th is becoming not only advisable, but necessary, along with measures to remedy the pre-17th problems. Those measures can include modeling the appointment of senators along lines similar to the appointment of state judges. The governor can appoint, and the Legislature can advise, consent, and either confirm or block. Each state can decide for itself what is the best remedy for that state. True, human nature will not change, and our inclination toward sin will remain as strong as ever, but the system of checks and balances will moderate the results, as the Founders knew it would.
One major benefit of repeal would be that senators would no longer need to grandstand. They would no longer need to raise millions of dollars for political campaigns. They would get their marching orders not from unelected multi-billionaires, but from the elected officials of their states.
Granted, any proposal to repeal and replace the 17th Amendment is going be unpopular, both with uninformed voters and with those who become wealthy by corruption and dirty politics. It may be a non-starter at first. Decades of dumbing down our schools will have its effect. Voters will resist having their vote “taken away from them.”
Perhaps its time has not yet come, but as our system becomes more infested with the money of those who hate us, it will.
Image via Pxfuel.