Repeal the 17th Amendment or Abolish the Senate

The United States federal government is a mess. It is a bloated, ineffective bureaucracy that wastes money by the billions, overly controls people’s lives, and runs completely contrary to the original intent of the nation’s founders.

It is run by a self-serving governing elite in Washington who get themselves elected only to enrich themselves and their benefactors, not to do right by the people, are as detached from the people as medieval monarchs used to be, and are supported by a “deep state” monolith of entrenched career bureaucrats who view themselves as sort of mid-level “rulers” over the people they are supposed to be serving.

The government “of the people, by the people and for the people” has become a government “of the ‘elites,’ by the lawyers, and for the special interests.”

The Washington political establishment is, as our current president likes to say, “a swamp.” It has taken many decades, well over a century, to create this swollen, tangled and corrupt swamp, and draining it will not be easy. In fact, short of a complete national catastrophe, it might be just about impossible.

One of the worst parts of this Washington swamp, and a part that could be reformed, is the United States Senate. At best, the Senate is ineffective. At worst it is the people’s second worst enemy after the bureaucracy.

Something needs to be done about the Senate.

A Bit of Historical Background

The United States was envisioned by its founders as just that: a union of individual, sovereign states – not a single, homogeneous, amorphous blob of a country. The states had different characters, cultures and interests. In framing the Constitution so that these individual states could bind themselves together successfully into a unified country, they knew they had to carefully balance the rights of these states with those that the states would surrender to a federal government.

The balancing act included a number of provisions that we commonly call the “checks and balances” of government. The federal government was divided into three branches – executive, legislative and judicial – which had specific functions and responsibilities, and even more important, the ability to check the power of the other two branches. At that time, a “deep state” bureaucracy could not even have been imagined.

But at the nation’s founding, the “balance of powers” was more about balancing power between the federal government and the states than it was about balancing power among the branches of the federal government. Many of the founders were highly suspicious of a powerful central government and insisted that the states must be strong to protect the rights of the people and prevent the central government from overpowering and imposing the will of a governing elite on the people.

One way to give the states significant power in the policies and operation of the federal government was the United States Senate. The founders divided the legislative branch – the Congress – into two houses: the House of Representatives, to directly represent the people, and the Senate, to represent the governments of the states.

The people would elect their representatives to the House every two years, and the number of representatives would reflect the population. As population grew, new House districts would be added and the number of representatives would increase. States with large populations would have more representatives than states with smaller populations, but this did not matter because Congressmen were supposed to directly represent the people, not the states.

If this were the only form of a federal legislature, it was clear that more populous states would dominate the smaller states; thus, the rights of the smaller states would be in danger of being trampled on by the larger ones. At the time of the convention, there was no way that Delaware, Rhode Island, or other small states would ratify a Constitution that gave more rights to New York, Virginia, Massachusetts or Pennsylvania.

The founders knew also that a straight democracy was not the best form of government for a country. Direct democracy can work for a town or city, but because people’s passions can be easily enflamed, a straight democracy can result in tyranny almost as sure as autocratic rule. So they created a republican form of democracy.

As part of that republican democracy, and to ensure that the interests of the states were served equally, the legislative branch included a second, “higher” chamber made up of representatives of the states: the Senate. Each state was to have two representatives to the Senate, each selected by the legislature of that state, so that the states would have equal power in that body.

The essence of a senator’s duty was to act as a sovereign representative of his (there were no women in government at that time) state in the federal government. Fisher Ames, a member of the Massachusetts committee for ratification of the Constitution referred to senators as “ambassadors of their states” to the federal government.

The Senate also adopted a number of procedures and rules that differed greatly from the House of Representatives. For many purposes, a motion required two-thirds of the members to approve measures, instead of just a simple majority. In the current Senate, with 100 total members, for example, the threshold for passage of many bills is 60, not 51.

And only the Senate employs the maneuver called a filibuster, where one member can keep the floor as long as he or she (there are women there now) is able, and in so doing can hold up or even block a measure from being voted on.

The framers had it basically right. The system did provide a greater balance of power between the states and the federal government and kept Washington from taking too much power… for a time.

Bad Things Happened

The first bad thing that happened was the Civil War. When a group of southern states decided that the federal government had gone too far in infringing on their economic rights over the issue of slavery, they decided to secede from the union and form a new confederation. They were wrong, of course, to practice and insist on continuing slavery. But I am not so sure that they were wrong to insist on upholding their rights against the federal government.

The southern states lost the war and, in that loss, they also lost – for all the states – a large portion of their sovereignty. In winning the war, and in actions taken in the following decades, the federal government became stronger and exercised even greater power over the states and the people.

The Main Point: The 17^th Amendment

During the 19^th century, there were a number of people who argued that senators should be popularly elected by the people of their states and not by the state legislatures. State legislatures were seen as corrupt, and it was viewed as easy for aspiring senators to “buy votes” from those state legislators. By contrast, it was naively assumed that in a popular vote, corruption would not play a part.

In fact, corruption did exist in many of the legislatures, just as it existed in cities and counties all across America and in the federal government itself. The 19^th century was a particularly corrupt time in American history. Some of the most famous stories of American political corruption came out of big cities in the second half of the that century – the Democrat Tammany Hall political machine in New York, for example.

Eventually, in the early 20^th century, the 17^th Amendment to the Constitution, for the popular election of senators, was passed and ratified. This, along with several other “progressive” (socialist) ideas – like the 16^th Amendment, the national income tax – had been successfully pushed by the administration of one of America’s worst presidents, Woodrow Wilson. It was seen as a reform to counter the corruption.

But eventually, leading up to the present, the 17^th Amendment created a whole new and much larger kind of corruption in the election of senators. Even worse, it has completely trashed the founders’ notion of the Senate as a balance on behalf of the states. In fact, all the Senate is now is a place where good ideas go to die and where senators get immensely wealthy.

What’s Wrong with the Senate

Popular election of senators created a body in which the members no longer represented their state governments. They used to take the positions of their state legislators and governors with them to the Senate floor, and their arguments were (ideally) based on what was in the best interests of their states.

But now, they totally ignore what’s best for their states. They are representatives of their political parties, not the states or even the people. Even worse, they are bought and paid for by special interests: corporations, labor unions, banks and other financial interests, religious or antireligious interests, hardcore environmentalists, social identity interests, and the list goes on.

The 17^th Amendment promised an end to corruption in the selection of senators, but in every election millions of dollars pour into key state races from outside of those states. The money comes from the national Democratic or Republican parties and from the many special interests. It may not be corruption in the classical sense, but it is all about outside interests working to influence the election within the state. If you are a Libertarian, Green or other “independent” trying to get elected to a Senate seat, you haven’t got a chance because of the power of outside money.

The worst part of this is that senators now are almost completely detached from their states. They don’t stand up for the rights of their states or the people of those states because they are part of the federal establishment in Washington. Their money and support comes from the lobbyists who haunt the halls of Congress and from the national political parties.

Ostensibly, there are now only two competing interests in the Senate: the Republicans vs. the Democrats. But in reality, it is the Washington political “establishment” (Republicans and Democrats together) against the people of all the states. States hardly matter anymore, but they should.

Repeal the 17^th Amendment or Abolish the Senate

I would love to see the 17^th Amendment repealed and the founders’ original intent in the Constitution reinstated. If our senators were selected by the state legislatures, I believe they would be more responsive to their states and, in turn, to the people of those states.

Today, we have greater means to catch the kind of corruption that the proponents of the 17^th Amendment were so concerned about. And if the corrupt power of the national parties and special interests over the senators could be broken, the Senate might actually be able to get something accomplished.

I would also like to see some kind of meaningful control over the influence of the national political parties and – especially – special-interest money in all our elections, at every level. There is no doubt that running for office requires money, and that giving money to a political candidate is a form of free speech. But there has to be a line drawn between the regular citizen supporting a candidate and a megawealthy corporation essentially “buying” that politician.

But if the 17^th Amendment can’t be repealed, then perhaps we need an amendment to simply abolish the Senate altogether. The original intent of the Senate has been completely lost, and it no longer serves a useful purpose. Even worse, with its arcane rules and procedures, it often prevents good legislation from the House from getting enacted.

Those rules and procedures worked a long time ago when the purpose of the Senate was to protect the rights of the states against the federal government or the threat of direct democratic tyranny from the House. But now those rules and procedures are just used by the political parties to fight with one another or by the political “elites” to kill anything that might actually benefit the people at the expense of the “ruling class” and their benefactors.

Either way, the Senate needs to revert back to its original purpose, or it has to go.

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