Modern politics dictates repeal of 17th not enough

The Libertarian Current ^ | May 23, 2010 | Don Kissick

[Star Traveler]

You were saying ...

But the Senate was not designed to be directly accountable to the people -- we already had the House for that. The Senate, by its accountability to the state legislature, was to turn back efforts by the Federal government to take power away from the states.

Yeah, it's obvious that it wasn't designed that way originally, but it's like all the other Amendments to the Constitution -- it changes the way the people want to be governed -- and the people have that right to change the Constitution (which they have many times) and so they did so in this case.

Even the Bill of Rights are the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution, and the Constitution was changed at that time for good reason, too. I would not be an advocate of putting the Constitution back in its original form, not at all.

So, I don't think an argument of "that's the way it was before" is going to work, when it was put through by the very process that the people of the various states and this country used to get it changed (to the way it is now).

And in reality, this kind of move "removes the accountability" of those Seantors -- to the people of their respective states by another "level of bureaucracy" -- and I don't think "the people" are going to go for that.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

I suspect that the influence of big cities in legisl00tures was enabled, in part, by the to-me-infamous Reynolds v. Sims decision, which mandated that each house of each state legisl00ture represent people proportionally (one-man-one-vote). Prior to that, you could have it arranged so that one house of the legisl00ture represented people county-by-county, giving equal power among counties and basically distributing power in that house away from the populous big cities.

[Pecos]

But wasn’t that, in itself, somewhat a product of the Progressivism of the day? I confess to being somewhat fuzzy on all of the antecedents of legislation that happened before my time. All I know for sure is that unintended consequences jump up and bite us in the butt at nearly every turn. As an example, I doubt very much that the people who had just won the Civil War intended that the 14th Amendment would some day be used to surrender the country to anchor babies and their parents.