Posted on 08/30/2016 7:37:02 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
With the prospect of a President Donald Trump or a President Hillary Clinton on the horizon, the growing trend toward the executive acting without the consent of Congress is troubling to all political stripes. Both parties claim to worry about a strong presidency, at least if the other party is in the White House.
That trend has been exacerbated by President Obama, but it certainly didn’t start with him. With the exception of Calvin Coolidge, every president of the 20th and 21st centuries contributed to the problem.
Many proposals to address the imperial presidency have been floated over the decades. Some have even been implemented. None has stemmed the tide.
To rebalance the separation of powers, it is necessary to make Congress stronger. The best way to do that? Abolish the Senate.
The original constitutional purpose of the Senate — to represent the states, not the people who live in them — has long since been abandoned. With the 17th Amendment’s requirement that senators be popularly elected, there is no chance that it will ever be recovered.
Likewise, the original political purpose of the Senate — to act as a “cooling saucer” for the hot passions of the more-democratic House — has fallen victim to the evolving nature of American governance. The Senate has become more like the House, partly because more House members are being elected to the Senate, and also because the Senate’s real institutionalists — such as West Virginia Democrat Robert C. Byrd and Mississippi Republican Trent Lott — are no longer around.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The founders wouldn’t recognize this government if they were to come back... nor would they approve.
So, you are saying that them staying for their 6 year terms as specified by the Constitution rather to than not staying, which was NOT specified by the Constitution, proved that the Framers plan didn’t work?
“Rampant corruption”?
Gee ... update your rhetoric with a bit or proportionality of what rampant corruption actually is, please, when you compare today’s soiled chamber pots with yesterday’s common dinnerware.
You’ve just made my point. What the Founders intent was that the Senators would vote the way they were directed to do so by the state legislatures. If the Senators refused to follow said instructions, they would do the gentlemanly thing and step down and allow the legislature (or Governor, if not in session) to choose a replacement who would. When the Senators stopped doing that early on and acted independently or in opposition to their state legislatures, it ceased to be what it was intended to be.
The only way to have kept it as the Founders intended was to have made it so that if a Senator went off the proverbial reservation with respect to his state, that a simple legislative majority vote could remove them from office with an immediate election triggered. That way, you’d at least have had close responsiveness to the state legislatures as elected representatives of the people.
They wouldn’t believe we were allowing parasites to vote, nevermind hold office.
I was always taught that the idea behind the 17th was that special interests were able to corrupt and control state legislatures with relatively little money and that bribing the entire electorate of a state would be beyond their means—hence the 17th amendment. I have no doubt that that was true in many states. But by giving up the concept that the Senate represented the states’ governments, corrupt or not, I still cannot fathom why 3/4 of the state legislatures gave that power away.
As to the income tax, the argument was that the tariff was unfair to the poor, since they tended to buy cheaper imported goods. And only the very wealthy (I believe those making over 10,000 1913 dollars) would have to pay any income tax all. I don’t think the income tax was looked as diminishing states’ power in the Federal government.
What was not specified in the Constitution doesn’t mean it was not understood by those in office HOW they were supposed to fulfill their responsibilities. They were elected by and understood to be serving at the pleasure of their state legislatures. They voted in the manner in which the legislatures directed them to. Very early U.S. Senators understood this, but in time, that duty and obligation (however not explicitly specified - a Gentlemen’s Agreement as I call it) slacked off until it ceased altogether.
I’d say when you have men effectively bribing legislators and it attracted attention nationally, that’s rampant. Did it happen in every instance ? No. But it was occurring enough times over several decades that the institution was becoming diminished as a result.
They were a disgraceful lot for precisely the same reasons why Wilson ever was elected: dishonor and lost love for the Republic we were given were already rampant.
I mean: Wilson had the gall to credit our rights to flaccid musings of Frenchmen on the Rights of Man when, under THAT form of laws! where all things are mere artifacts of politics, those self same Frenchmen without hypocricy cast all that aside for Terrors and dechristianization.
The 17th improved nothing but only made things worse by making it easier for lawless scumbags to prosper in the absence of needing to please their own peers back home.
Sometimes a roadblock, even one that is weakened by the imposition of foreign doctrines, is better than a open highway to heck.
“Washington Post is code ‘dumb as a box of rocks’”
—
It is the Washington ComPost (Communist Post)
or “compost” i.e. dumber than dirt
And now the “progressives” not only expect governance by unconstitutional means they also don’t care about Pay for Play just so long as it’s one of theirs ... and the Republicans have become like worn out old whores trying to simultaneously sustain the legacy of FDR but somehow slow it’s growth.
Yeah, things were sooooo bad before the 17th.
Coolidge was the best man to be President and the best President in U.S. history. Reagan is #2.
If Trump wins World War III, which is taking place now, with the U.S. government on the wrong side, he will be a greater President than Reagan. His task is unprecedented.
First: He must wake half the American people up to the fact that we are under attack.
Second: He must awaken the American people to the fact that the last four Presidents have been traitors. (Never mind for the time being the treasons of Johnson, Ford, and Carter.)
Third: He must wake the American people up to the seizure of virtually all institutions by Marxists—the Papacy, the clergy, the universities, the federal and state governments, the courts, the Democrat party, the GOPe, the media, the big foundations.
Fourth: He must mobilize the country to imprison and execute traitors, expel the vast army of Muslim invaders, deport the army of illegal aliens, etc.
Then, fighting the war begins.
He’s correct. The 17th amendment fatally distorted the nature of the Senate.
They’re not going to become magically better now repealing the 17th, which is the whole point.
I put Harding ahead of Coolidge. Harding resolved the Wilson Recession in record time, cut the government’s size and spending. Coolidge continued on that track, though his single appointment to SCOTUS, the leftist RINO Harlan Fiske Stone (who so impressed FDR that he made him Chief Justice), was a huge black mark (and only to be exceeded by Ike’s even more horrid choice of Earl Warren).
Senator Robert Bird belonged to the KKK.
We’ve come a long way baby... from when only white, male, adult property owners could vote at the time the constitution was ratified.
The change in voting laws has had more to do with how the country has changed than anything else. Save for the slaves, it wouldn’t be hard to make the argument that things have not changed for the better.
I’d settle for adult property owners, age 30 and upwards, those with military service voting, and no one receiving public moneys (welfare of any sort) may vote or those employed in any fashion (exclusive of military and public safety) by the government. No more bureaucracy growing itself like a metastasizing cancer.
There’s no doubt that Coolidge would have handled Wilson’s depression exactly the same way—since he kept Mellon on for his whole term.
Coolidge vetoed lots of bad bills, and of course cut the income tax. Top rate: 25%. Trump’s top rate, btw.
If Trump would propose to repeal the 16th and 17th amendments, and abolish the Fed...
Why two “consecutive” terms? Why not just “two terms”?
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