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To: OneLoyalAmerican

The passage of the 17th Amendment (direct election of US Senators) in 1913 inverted the relationship of the Federal government to the States. Previously, US Senators were elected by their respective state legislatures and as such reported to and protected the interests of the states in federal matters. Now the federal government is in control of the states and one of the fruits of that has been the willingness of the federal government to spend far more money than it takes in.

We can debate tax policy and tax rates all day, but what counts is spending. Economist Milton Friedman pointed out the obvious: the federal government must get the money it spends by borrowing, inflating or taxing. Since the federal spending is so out of balance, the best way to throttle its powers over all of us is to forbid it to borrow any more.

As a political reality, people today are far more worried about the level of government debt than ever before. So, the time may be sufficiently ripe to enable such an amendment to pass.

We must do everything we can to put the Leviathan State back in it cage before we find the cage it is putting us in has a lock on the door that we cannot pick.


6 posted on 03/24/2012 5:23:42 AM PDT by theBuckwheat
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To: theBuckwheat
The 17th did two horrible things.

First, it simply destroyed federalism.

Second, our Framers never seriously considered popular election as the basis for both houses of Congress. Excessive representative democracy in the States was one of several reasons for the Constitutional Convention and they knew it was fatal to base republican legislation entirely on the passions of the people.

Also, they would spit blood at the thought of six year terms for popularly elected officials. The primary reason we do not have one year terms for Congressmen was the difficulty of 18th century travel.

13 posted on 05/08/2012 3:20:32 AM PDT by Jacquerie (No court will save us from ourselves.)
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