This also points toward the pre-17th Amendment Senate.
Having had plenty of experience with popular government, the Framers expected wild, levelling bills from the House of Reps.
Their Senate of the States admirably served its designed purposes; one of which was to stop tyrannical majoritarianism.
Rather than serve as a check on the House, the post-17th Senate is the enabler of majoritarian tyranny. Witness now Chuckie emboldens Nanzi. If we still had a senate of the states, an expansive franchise would present far less of a threat to liberty.
Article V.
Yes.
The 17th Amendment was advanced by Progressives and intended to result in a Senate more amendable to advancing Progressive agendas, to expand rule by administrative regulations with powers handed to the executive by a “progressive” thinking Congress, and not stopped by states with their own true representation in the Senate.
It was among the most Federal concepts that the Senate as a body was to be a body representing the states, as entities with a share in federal decisions, and not a body elected by individuals, representing individuals who elected them. The Senate was the “uniting” of the united states within a federal government.
You can see the march of Progressivism following the 17th Amendment.
The giant fallacy - and illogical and irrational hole - in progressivism is its belief in essentially “rule by the experts” - the executive administrative state. Like the founders progressives don’t trust the hoi polloi, but the want to use them (democracy) to establish agencies that once established don’t have to ask the hoi polloi what to do - the experts will tell them (a) what the experts will do and (b) what the hoi polloi must do, by law, because the experts say so.
Why irrational and illogical?
What is an “expert”, is their only one, or only one group?
Well, in government, on any one topic, there can only be one top expert or one top expert group - appointed and hired by the executive.
But in life is there only one possible best “expert” in anything? No.
The illogical irrational fallacy of “rule by the experts” is that it is like suggesting that by mere appointment or hired into the role of the OFFICIAL expert(s) that such persons are miraculously endowed with only the very best humanly possible expert opinions, which no one need question, merely obey.
Instead of Fauci, the nation needs to PUBLICLY hear from all sorts of experts OUTSIDE of government, as should the elected people in government. Decisions should not be made on some “official” opinion, but by learning, consulting and weighing multiple opinions from INDEPENDT experts in any field.
The PROGRESSIVES hate that latter point because it requires the politically uncertain process of elected representatives as the ones to weigh those opinions, after deciding if it is government that should act at all, or if the public has enough good informed opinions within its free institutions & enterprises, and the individual states, such that THE PEOPLE have the means to act without federal action. NO. Progressivism - rule by the experts - requires the constant expansion of federal power so that there is only one set of “official” positions that all lower “officials” in the states must follow.