Posted on 10/27/2002 9:52:46 AM PST by an opinion
We should repeal the 17th Amendment and let the states choose their senators. Its pretty obvious that provincial politics would provide better results than deluding the electorate into thinking their votes really count.
(Excerpt) Read more at nhinet.org ...
Campaigns for the House could be conducted through town meetings, rallys, and direct mail. No need for TV time.
No real need for Senate campaigns at all, although the Lincoln-Douglass debates were about becoming a Senator before the 17th Ammendment was passed.
At the time of the Founding, wealth came from the land and what could be grown on it. Of the Framers, only Hamilton had a inkling of what kind of wealth could be generated from manufactures. After the Civil War when the Industrial Revolution hit America in full earnest, wealth began to concentrate in the hands of mill and factory owners, and with that wealth came political power in the rawest of forms.
There was no secret ballot then. When you went to cast your vote, you told the county clerk whom you were voting for. In some jurisdictions, factory owners would parade their workers to the polling place in military rank and file -- and next to the county clerk sat the company representative who made sure you voted the "right" way. If you didn't, you would be fired, evicted from your company housing, and your scrip would no longer be good at the company store. In some of the more corrupt districts it was impossible to tell where the company goon squad ended and local law enforcement began, and your life would be in grave danger.
This corruption translated from counties to the state legislatures. The California legislature was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Southern Pacific Railway, and in Montana it was Anaconda Copper. In Pennsylvania, the coal interests owned the legislature, and in the post-Civil War South it was the cotton and textile interests. Because state legislatures chose US senators, this corruption translated to the Senate. The Senator from California, for example, was known as the senator from the Southern Pacific.
The Progressives were an outgrowth of eastern and mid-western Republicanism who favored changing the laws to blunt the effects of robber baron capitalism before more radical people, like the Populists, could nationalize everything in sight. They thought of this kind of change as preventive medicine. The Progressives made the secret ballot, primary elections, popular election of senators, and iniative/referendum/recall their major platforms for change.
The Progressives also had another agenda. The Civil War was not that far in the past, and the Progressives wanted to de-emphasize the states in favor of the greater national sovereignty propounded by Hamilton, Clay, Webster and Lincoln. Realizing the role that the Constitution's strictures on federal tax collection had played in the events leading to the Civil War, the Progressives wanted to permit direct federal taxation, and the 16th Amendment was their vehicle to remove the states from federal tax policy.
Even the Pledge of Allegiance was a part of the Progressive's plan to emphasize national sovereignty by replacing the Constitution as America's unifying icon with the Flag. The goal was to get people to turn to their government for solutions, not to themselves or their private associations.
The Senate, of course, vehemently opposed direct election. So the state legislatures began issuing a call for a Convention for Proposing Amendments under Article V of the US Constitution. As the applications from the states amassed, Congress panicked. Holding an Article V Convention with all this agitation for change in the air frightened both sides in Congress. The idea of letting the states of the Old Confederacy propose amendments to the Constitution only 48 years after Appomattox terrified the Progressives and much of the national establishment. Nobody wanted a surprise.
When there was only one state to go to trigger a convention call, the Senate passed the 17th Amendment with the necessary two-thirds majority, and the states ratified in recond time. Thus did the Framer's concept of one House for the People and one House for the States fall.
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