Senate Democrats Channeling Woodrow Wilson In Upcoming Power Grab

What we are witnessing today is a power grab to advance an ideology, pure and simple. A power grab by an arrogant, condescending group of individuals who do not wish to be restrained by the confines put in place by our Founding Fathers.

Individuals who feel they are superior to the greatest collection of minds in the history of human kind.

You're welcome. It isn't surprising that you never heard family stories about the flu. Many families were not directly affected, although almost everyone knew of families that were. It's one of the biggest disasters in U.S. and world history, but due largely to suppression of press freedoms at the time because of WWI, the pandemic was pretty much buried in the dusty back shelves of history.

Wilson, by the way, although thought of at the time as a "conservative," was actually the first Leftist president in the modern sense of that term. Terms like progressive, liberal and conservative didn't mean then what they do now. His legacy has been almost uniformly horrific.

I must be the dumbest Freeper around because I am not seeing the difference in Senators being elected by legislatures who are elected by the people as opposed to the people themselves electing the Senators...

You're not dumb, merely uninformed about the Founders' intent in the way they divided powers. Back in their day, the states were thought of pretty much as sovereign nations. They chose to create a federation primarily to provide for the common defense and make interstate commerce more uniform. Kind of like the free trade agreement of their day.

When the delegates met in Philadelphia for what became the first Constitutional Convention, their original goal was merely to find a way to strengthen the Articles of Confederation, which had proven to be unworkable. Instead, they completely junked the Articles and wrote the Constitution. In creating a centralized federal government, they tried to balance three interests: those of the individual sovereign states, those of the people, and those of the new federalized nation.

They used two methods to protect the states. The first was the electoral college, which evened the power among large and small states in electing the national president. The second was to have the state governments, via their legislatures, choose their agents to represent them at the federal level. Those agents were U.S. senators, whose main role was to protect the interests of their sovereign states.

With senators now being elected directly by the people within a state, senators are nothing more than glorified U.S. House representatives (who are supposed to be the people's agents in Congress). Senators no longer are agents for the state governments in Washington.

You see, House members only have to campaign in their home districts, so theoretically they are closer to the people they represent. Senators used to have a similar close relationship with the people they represented -- the state governments. Now senators just campaign state-wide and are not close to anyone other than whoever contributes the most to their campaigns. They have no true constituency other than the general electorate of their states. They are not agents for their state governments at the federal level. In fact, the states have no voice in Washington. They have zero representation at the federal level.

The Founders gave us a Constitutional Republic. The 17th Amendment basically killed the Republic and gave us a direct democracy.

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