So You Still Want to Choose Your Senator?

[groovedaddy]

Few members of the Tea Party have endorsed Rand Paul’s misgivings about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but a surprising number are calling for the repeal of an older piece of transformative legislation: the 17th Amendment. If you don’t have the Constitution on your smartphone, that’s the one adopted in 1913 that provides for direct popular election of United States senators.

Allowing Americans to choose their own senators seems so obvious that it is hard to remember that the nation’s founders didn’t really trust voters with the job. The people were given the right to elect House members. But senators were supposed to be a check on popular rowdiness and factionalism. They were appointed by state legislatures, filled with men of property and stature.

A modern appreciation of democracy — not to mention a clear-eyed appraisal of today’s dysfunctional state legislatures — should make the idea unthinkable. But many Tea Party members and their political candidates are thinking it anyway, convinced that returning to the pre-17th Amendment system would reduce the power of the federal government and enhance state rights.

Senate candidates have to raise so much money to run that they become beholden to special interests, party members say. They argue that state legislators would not be as compromised and would choose senators who truly put their state’s needs first.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/opinion/01tue4.html?th&emc=th

[trotsky]

1. Obviously the teabaggers aren't aware of this little tidbit:

Democrats Control Twice as Many State Legislatures as Republicans
:rofl:

[CanonRay]

2. We don't now...the corporations do it for us.

[dhpgetsit]

3. Cons want as little democracy as possible.

They insist we are not a democracy, we are a republic.
I say we are both. In the broad sense we are certainly a democracy.
We are a constitutionally limited democratic republic.

We have more to fear from corporate influence over Congress than we have from the influence of We the People over Congress.

[starroute]

4. I guess they haven't looked into the history much

http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Direct_Election_Senators.htm

This process seemed to work well until the mid-1850s. At that time, growing hostilities in various states resulted in vacant Senate seats. In Indiana, for example, the conflict between Democrats in the southern half of the state and the emerging Republican party in the northern half prevented the election of any candidate, thereby leaving the Senate seat vacant for two years. This marked the beginning of many contentious battles in state legislatures, as the struggle to elect senators reflected the increasing tensions over slavery and states' rights which led to the Civil War.

After the Civil War, problems in senatorial elections by the state legislatures multiplied. . . . Intimidation and bribery marked some of the states' selection of senators. Nine bribery cases were brought before the Senate between 1866 and 1906. In addition, forty-five deadlocks occurred in twenty states between 1891 and 1905, resulting in numerous delays in seating senators. In 1899, problems in electing a senator in Delaware were so acute that the state legislature did not send a senator to Washington for four years. . . .

After the turn of the century, momentum for reform grew rapidly. William Randolph Hearst expanded his publishing empire with Cosmopolitan, and championed the cause of direct election with muckraking articles and strong advocacy of reform. Hearst hired a veteran reporter, David Graham Phillips, who wrote scathing pieces on senators, portraying them as pawns of industrialists and financiers. The pieces became a series titled "The Treason of the Senate," which appeared in several monthly issues of the magazine in 1906. These articles galvanized the public into maintaining pressure on the Senate for reform.


http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=old&doc=58

Late in the 19th century, some state legislatures deadlocked over the election of a senator when different parties controlled different houses, and Senate vacancies could last months or years. In other cases, special interests or political machines gained control over the state legislature. Progressive reformers dismissed individuals elected by such legislatures as puppets and the Senate as a "millionaire’s club" serving powerful private interests.

One Progressive response to these concerns was the "Oregon system," which utilized a state primary election to identify the voters’ choice for Senator while pledging all candidates for the state legislature to honor the primary’s result. Over half of the states adopted the "Oregon system," but the 1912 Senate investigation of bribery and corruption in the election of Illinois Senator William Lorimer indicated that only a constitutional amendment mandating the direct election of Senators by a state’s citizenry would allay public demands for reform.

When the House passed proposed amendments for the direct election of Senators in 1910 and 1911, they included a "race rider" meant to bar Federal intervention in cases of racial discrimination among voters. This would be done by vesting complete control of Senate elections in state governments. A substitute amendment by Senator Joseph L. Bristow of Kansas provided for the direct election of Senators without the "race rider." It was adopted by the Senate on a close vote before the proposed constitutional amendment itself passed the Senate. Over a year later, the House accepted the change, and on April 8, 1913, the resolution became the 17th amendment.

[nichomachus]

5. The Founders didn't believe in the popular election of a president either

Electors were to be appointed by the various states, but no indication of how that was to be done.

Their Utopian dream was a country that was kind of a gentleman's club, where the moneyed elite would get together and pick the leaders from among themselves.

[Puzzler]

6. Let's see, "17th amendment bad, 2nd amendment good... two legs bad ...

... four legs good"

Clear to me now.

[Old Troop]

7. If Senators could be appointed, Scott Brown wouldn't be in Congress.

[struggle4progress]

8. If anything, state legislatures are more subject to special interest pressure

than Congress. Repealing the 17th amendment is a sure-fire recipe for filling the US Senate with real political hacks and reducing even further the competence of our Senators