U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the Judiciary Committee chairman.
Thurmond says Leahy broke a promise to allow a vote on Shedd.
Repeal the 17th Amendment!!!
The Founding Fathers may have been right, when the wrote a Constitution in which state legislatures elect US Senators.
May have been? They were dead on. The 17th has only been around since what, 1913? Our country was the other way longer than the way it is now.
I think it is pretty clear our Founding Fathers were afraid of the idea of democracy and rightly so. They only gave one sixth of the gov't over to democracy. One sixth. They never intended for the President to be democratically elected- the General Election is basically a token gesture, an act of appeasement to the rabble if you will. They never intended for the Senate to be democratically elected. They never intended for the Justices to be at the mercy of democratically elected representatives. All the important roles of the Congress they gave to the non-democratically elected Senate- Treaty ratification, Approving Justices etc. The Senators were also given the longest terms. They knew that the House of Representatives would be basically a monkey house of a forum for the rabble to get up on a soap box and pontificate and this is reflected in the extremely brief terms they were given. If a Rep proved to be a jack-ass he could be dumped in short order while the more responsible section of the Congress (the Senate) would be able to have 6 years to work on their ideas.
If we were to repeal the 17th, you would see much change almost immediately. The focus in politics would rightly return to the States. Who the people elected for their State legislatures would be extremely important and you'd see the various parties do more than pay lip service to the smaller States because the process would work a lot like the Baseball Farm system. You want a Republican controlled Senate 12 years from now- you'd better start now in those states even though the election is 12 yrs away. You'd see most of the ugly politics return to the States as well. Let the local boys sling mud at each other over who they're going to send to the US Senate. Let them do the name calling and hair pulling. Let that ugliness be carried out on a State level rather than a National one. The Senators would be much easier for the States themselves to control as well.
I'm with you!