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To: AuH2ORepublican
Just to be clear, because I'm having trouble actually believing this, you are honestly suggesting that had that had 17th amendment never been ratified the NC legislature would have appointed the exact same people, along with every other state legislature in America, every law that was passed would have been passed, every law that wasn't passed wouldn't have been passed, not one thing could have possibly changed, leading us up to the exact same moment in 1975 where Jesse Helms was ready to become a Senator but couldn't due to the evil of the constitution as written.

Remarkable.

I'm pretty sure believing in a personally made up alternate reality makes one, technically at least, delusional. Just sayin.

45 posted on 05/16/2014 1:00:28 PM PDT by Durus (You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. Ayn Rand)
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To: Durus

Have you heard of the economic concept of ceteris paribus? Well, I’m saying that, all other things being equal, a state whose voters elected Democrats to the state legislature for a 130-year period would not have done a 180 and started electing Republicans halfway through that 130-year period just because the state legislature regained the power to elect U.S. Senators. It is risible that you can impute such magical powers to the repeal of the 17th Amendment. The number of voters who would switch from Democrat to Republican just because one of the umpteen things that state legislators do is elect U.S. Senators would be a very small number. In most states, governors get to appoint U.S. Senators in the case of a vacancy—how many voters switch allegiance just because one of the umpteen things that a governor does is appoint U.S. Senators? For decades voters in Massachusetts displayed their preference for electing liberal Democrats to the U.S. Senate, yet they still voted for Republicans for governor in 1990, 1994, 1998 and 2002, and it took the Democrat legislature to change the law (overriding the governor’s veto) so that the governor could not appoint a replacement Senator until the next general election. You are assuming that voters would react far differently with the repeal of the 17th Amendment and would begin to elect conservative Republican state legislators just because of two votes they cast in each six-year period, and that is a whopper of an assumption.


46 posted on 05/16/2014 1:38:24 PM PDT by AuH2ORepublican (If a politician won't protect innocent babies, what makes you think that he'll defend your rights?)
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