When Colorado Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck briefly
(and temporarily) suggested support for allowing state legislatures
rather than the public to select U.S. senators, he stuck his
well-known
bovine digestive refuse-covered boots into
the messy civics lesson that is the 2010 election.
For the first time during my 25 years of following
politics, people who have the poor taste to bring up (in public!)
the Founders, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence,
natural rights, and basic precepts of good government are no longer
automatically judged to be wacko fringe extremists and likely
members of “militias,” nor automatically tagged with the perennial
establishment insult of “libertarian” — being called which has
always been my own version of Br’er Rabbit being thrown into the
briar patch.
The American public, with minds largely uncluttered —
just how the left wants you — by a basic education in what used to
be called “civics” (then “social studies,” and now “comparative
Native American basket weaving philosophies — see footnote on page
273 for information on George Washington”), is learning the
importance of fundamental American precepts the hard way: by living
through government of, by, and for people who dislike, distrust,
and completely misunderstand those precepts.
The day after Mr. Buck expressed his position on
legislatures selecting senators, he retracted that position and has
restated his current position — leaving the election of senators
in the hands of the public — multiple times since. The Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee (“DSCC”) nevertheless ran an ad
calling Buck’s idea “radically different,” saying Buck wants to
“rewrite the Constitution” and “end our right to vote.”
The message of the DSCC is that Ken Buck, a mainstream
conservative Republican, is “extreme.” But the presumption of their
message is that Americans are too ignorant of our own history to
know that Ken Buck’s original suggestion represented little more
than returning to the system of senatorial selection preferred by
our Founders and which was in place for the majority of our
republic’s history.
In particular, the United States Constitution in its
original form said in Section 3, Clause 1 that “The Senate of the
United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State,
chosen by the Legislature thereof…” It was not until the
17th Amendment, passed by Congress in 1912 and ratified
in 1913, that “chosen by the Legislature” was changed to “elected
by the people.”
The DSCC’s ad is doubly dishonest: It says that Buck holds
a position which they know he doesn’t hold, and they portray the
position as radical even though it represents the system which was
in place for 55% of the time since our Constitution was adopted.
Unfortunately, the DSCC is rightly betting that few who see the ad
will know this history (or that Buck doesn’t support the repeal of
the 17th Amendment.)
What people should — but mostly won’t — learn from the
DSCC’s ad is nothing about Ken Buck and a lot about the impact of
the 17th Amendment. It’s not as if the small handful of
(Republican) candidates for federal office who have suggested its
repeal will be able to get more than a 5 second discussion on the
issue from John Boehner. (OK, 5 seconds is an exaggeration since
Boehner’s likely response of “What planet are you from?” can be
scornfully delivered in two seconds flat. I timed it myself.) But
even the mention of the idea seems to scare the DSCC — as it
should, more than it should scare any other group on the
planet.
The 17th Amendment is a direct attack on federalism and
one of the greatest transfers of power from the states to the
federal government, and particularly to Democrat senators, in our
nation’s history. In a moment of remarkable candor, a U.S.
government website states directly that the change was
pushed
by “Progressive reformers.” It’s no wonder; they
knew exactly what they were doing.
In an important paper on “The
History of the Seventeenth Amendment and its Implications for
Current Reform Proposals,” George Mason University
law professor
Todd Zywicki makes some key points:
• The Senate was intended “to provide an
anti-democratic role under the Constitution, an American
version of the English House of Lords designed to check the
democratic excesses of the House of Representatives…”
• “Appointment of Senators by state legislatures gave the
states a constituent role in the national government and a means to
protect themselves from laws emanating from Washington designed to
subvert state sovereignty and independence.”
• Following the passage of the 17th Amendment,
“the 1920s showed for the first time federal intervention in
traditional state functions, and the first use of federal grants to
the states — along with accompanying federal control. Moreover,
the state governments have more and more been downgraded from
independent policy-making bodies to mere instrumentalities of the
federal government… Indeed, it is inconceivable that a Senator
during the pre-Seventeenth Amendment era would vote for an
‘unfunded federal mandate,’ thereby requiring state legislatures to
raise taxes and spend money on projects they did not devise and for
which they receive no political benefit.”
(You can hear a Cato Institute podcast on the topic with
Todd Zywicki
here.)
Even Alexander Hamilton, the leading champion among the
Founders of a powerful central government, said (in Federalist
59) that while there is risk to the central
government from a system in which state legislatures choose
senators, a system which had direct election of senators “would
doubtless have been interpreted into an entire dereliction of the
federal principle; and would certainly have deprived the State
governments of that absolute safeguard which they will enjoy under
this provision.”
The threads of the original intent — and why Democrat
senators in particular would want those threads shredded — quickly
become clear. Weakening a senator’s connection to his state and
putting him in a position to buy citizens’ votes with other
people’s money — standard operating procedure for both of today’s
major political parties — erodes any incentive to protect
federalism or to fight for limited, low-cost government.
Direct election of Senators turns them into
slightly-glorified Representatives, people who work in a body with
slightly different rules and who can wait 3 or 4 years before
putting on a full-court fund-raising press before their next
elections rather than House members who have to shake their tin cup
for campaign funds barely 12 months after an election. It’s a
distinction without a difference, but a real difference is what our
Founders intended for good reason.
To be sure, the repeal of the 17th Amendment would not
necessarily change much. Even if not required by the federal
Constitution to have popular election of senators, most states
would simply implement that same policy on a state level — as many
did at the urging of Progressives prior to the amendment’s passage.
Furthermore, the sad history of the past several decades in which
the federal government peddled its opiate of “block grants” and
“highway funds” other “free” money to the now-addicted states is
something that will require a rather potent budget-methadone
treatment that many citizens — and most politicians — might not
be able to handle.
But just having the discussion about repealing the 17th
Amendment — and I thank Ken Buck for bringing it up while wishing
he had the courage to stick with his gut instinct — represents a
valuable service to Americans by stoking a much-needed national
remedial civics lesson. When the Constitution becomes a topic for
public debate, it forces Democrats and Progressives to explain why
they routinely ignore, dismiss, or attack the Constitution with
their ultra-expensive Nanny State policies and their faux
philosophies of government such as a “living Constitution.” And
when our Constitution takes center stage in political discussion,
particularly when it can be shown that we ignore it at our own
peril, America takes a baby step toward relearning the value of our
Founding documents and principles. When even Germans are telling us
that “America
has become too European,” the civics lesson can’t
come a moment too soon.
