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 17th Amendment
During the 19th 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 19th 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 20th
century, the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, for the popular
election of senators, was passed and ratified. This, along with several other
“progressive” (socialist) ideas – like the 16th 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 17th 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 17th 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 17th Amendment or Abolish the Senate
I would love to see the 17th
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 17th
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 17th
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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