Yea, that should be easy.
I think it would have been better if it had remained that way.
Good luck getting a constitutional amendment abolishing the Senate passed by 2/3 of the Senate and House and 2/3 of the states.
Of course, the Constitution now says whatever 5 out of 9 Supreme Court Justices say it says. If the Supreme Court can discover previously unknown constitutional rights to sodomy and homosexual marriage then there is no telling what else they may find.
Well, as long as he goes about making the changes he wants in a constitutional way, more power to him. Go for it! All it takes is 2/3 of each House of Congress and 3/4 of the state legislatures.
He is exactly right that the Senate is anti-democratic. That is a feature, not a bug.
Oddly, nobody’s ever been able to whip up much enthusiasm for changing the system. Nobody seems to care much that it takes 75 Californians to equal the vote for the Senate of one guy from Wyoming.
Of course, if the two Houses are elected on the exact same basis, what’s the point of having two?
I knew this kind of BS was going to happen when they replaced history and civics with putting condoms on cucumbers in our so called schools. These kids are blithering idiots and morons. They are experts at molesting cucumbers however.
Hillary Calls For End To Electoral College
"We are a very different country than we were 200 years ago," Clinton said. "I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people and to me, that means it's time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president."
And most of them never read it. Democracy NEVER appears in the Constitution.
Article IV Section. 4.
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.
We need to repeal the 17th amendment and make our government even MORE Republican.
The ‘right’ thinking left believes the Constitution sounds like right-wing talking points ...
Why not just move straight to the People’s Rupublic of Cuba?
OF COURSE the Senate is “anti-democratic” That’s the point, and the founders’ intent. It’s republican, and was even more so before the misguided 17th Amendment was passed. The anti-democratic Senate is supposed to be one of our defenses against the horrors of democracy.
He hasn’t thought this through to the ultimate conclusion.
The senate would then be more like the House of representatives which is generally more conservative.
Imagine what would have happened to the democrats agenda the last two years if the senate had the same republican/demmocrat ratio as the House.
We already have the best Senators money can buy.
Apparently Dylan doesn’t understand that our Republic is a union of fifty sovereign states.
Was the author all for abolishing the senate when the democrats controlled the majority or does he have this sentiment only when the republicans control the senate majority?
More specifically, the Founding States had given constitutional control of the federal Senate uniquely to state lawmakers. This was done partly so that the Senate could kill any House appropriations bill which established taxes for issues which the states had never delegated to Congress, expressly via the Constitution, the specific powers to address. This is because House appropriations bills which cannot be justified under Congress’s constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers arguably steal state revenues. Justice John Marshall had put it this way.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
But as a consequence of the ill-conceived 17th Amendment (17A), low-information voters, voters who have probably never been taught about the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers including limited power to tax, are now regularly tricked into abusing their voting power by corrupt federal politicians who promise such voters federal spending programs which are based on constitutionally nonexistant federal government powers.
Again, basically as a consequence of 17A, the corrupt feds are stealing what are arguably state revenues by means of constitutionally indefensible federal taxes which the corrupt, voter-controlled Senate fails to stop. The Founders had intended for the states, not the corrupt feds, to provide most domestic “government” services.
Two concepts that Mr. Dylan missed in his Civics and American History classes:
1. Checks
2. Balances
These concepts, embedded in our republican form of democracy are what makes for American exceptionalism.
It stopped being “democratic” when career politicians took over.
The uneducated ignorant writer has the “negative” emphasis backwards. Its not that the deck is stacked “in favor of the small states”, it is that the design of the Senate representation is set to help insure it is not stacked “in favor of the big states”, that is states that are “big” merely in numbers of people. That’s because it is not the “people’s House. That’s the role of the House of Representatives. The Senate was established as the body representing the states, as entities with their own representation in the U.S. Congress. As originally designed, they were not even selected by “popular vote” but chosen by the state legislatures.
The writer that seeks to abolish the Senate has no idea what he’s talking about. What he sees as an error is not an error at all.
Yup. Every federal country has an appointed or elected Senate. I guess according to Dylan Matthews’ logic, they are “anti-democratic and should be abolished.”
Federalism represents communities of interests as well as people. But some liberals have a profound contempt for people living in small states, rural areas, small towns and places like Alaska.
Because in part of course, the real reason being that they won’t vote for the Left. Then let’s just get rid of any one who isn’t living in a big city. Now that’s a principle every good progressive can get behind.
After all, to them, untrammeled majoritarianism is the essence of democracy.