Posted on 09/08/2020 3:37:45 PM PDT by maggief
Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse called for the repeal of the 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution in an op-ed published Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal.
Proposed in 1912 and ratified by 36 state legislatures on April 8, 1913, the amendment required U.S. senators to be elected by popular votes in each state. Prior to its enactment, Article I of the Constitution mandated that each state legislature vote to send two senators to Washington.
Sasse’s op-ed, titled, “Make the Senate Great Again,” suggested several Senate reforms “aimed at promoting debate, not ending it.”
“What would the Founding Fathers think of America if they came back to life?” Sasse began. “Their eyes would surely bug out first at our technology and wealth. But I suspect they’d also be stunned by the deformed structure of our government. The Congress they envisioned is all but dead. The Senate in particular is supposed to be the place where Americans hammer out our biggest challenges with debate. That hasn’t happened for decades—and the rot is bipartisan.”
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
Basically, we did. Federalists and anti-Federalists (or Jeffersonian Republicans AKA Democrat-Republicans).
Alan Keyes called for this back when he ran for The Senate in Illinois. It didn’t go well for him.
Could this be Ben’s way of creating a larger platform, a higher profile for himself as a politician?
Does he have goals for higher office?
This sounds like something I’d expect Ted Cruz to do.
Only the Dem ones would.
I agree.
Could California and New York go any further left than Schumer and Harris and Feinstein? Just to cite two examples....
From what I seen, legislatures will vote for someone to the left of themselves, but never to the right of themselves.
However, long term, if state citizens know that their state senators are going to pick their U.S. senators, then over time the state legislatures will move toward the Dems.
Then we'll have one party rule down to the state level when the illegals are given amnesty and the wall is allowed to decay in place.
Not sure about term limits. I used to be for term limits but now I think doing so would empower the deep state.
Repealing the 17th Amendment is meaningless unless the 16th is also repealed.
The unimaginable amounts of money available to Congress and their “beneficiaries” is such that every state legislative body would be swimming in lobbyist cash.
You’d simply be moving the distribution point and make it harder to pinpoint the main players.
The elected faces are puppets anyway. The government is run by career people, staff, lobbyists, and other unelected powers.
He’s absolutely correct. The Senate was meant to represent the interests of the states. What the 17th amendment did was to further consolidate power in the hands of the federal government and further reduce the states from being constitutional actors which they originally were to being little more than administrative appendages of the federal government.
Yes!
We have all forgotten when this repeal consideration was one of the early goals of FR.
We ran threads about it in the old days.
The biggest issue was that a Senator’s indiidual power to block an issue was so great that the cost od buying a State Legislature made it too easy for interests to control the Senate.
6 is too many.........
Do we really want smokey backrooms filled with state legislators and lobbyists choosing our Senators?
I’ll back that.
In New York, de Blasio, Yvette Clarke, AOC(which could happen some day), Tiffany Caban, Jessica Ramos,Jamaal Bowman.
There are a lot, in both states.
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