Tag Archives: direct election of U.S. Senators

Why The Seventeenth Amendment Matters

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President Woodrow Wilson did a number of things that reformatted the plan for America our Founding Fathers designed. He signed into law a personal income tax, the federal reserve, and the direct election of Senators (the Seventeen Amendment).

The Seventeen Amendment states:

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.

When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.[2]

Before the Seventeenth Amendment, Senators were chosen by the state legislators and subject to recall if they did not represent the interests of the state. Without the Seventeenth Amendment, Senator Manchin of West Virginia would not have voted for the Inflation Reduction Act. Senator Manchin did not originally vote for the Inflation Reduction Act because he understood that the green energy provisions in the bill would be harmful to the economy of West Virginia. During the negotiations regarding the bill, promises were made that would slightly lessen the impact on West Virginia (the Democrats eventually reneged on those promises). Had the Senator been subject to recall, he would never have voted on the bill.

As I write this, the government shutdown is continuing. Simplified Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits will be ending on November 1. Do you really believe that Senators who were subject to recall by their state legislators would continue to vote to keep the government shutdown and would have the support of their state legislators in doing so?

I don’t know who will eventually be blamed for the prolonged government shutdown. I do know that it is hurting Americans and that those voting to keep the government shut down do not seem to care for the welfare of their voters. Those are the people who should be voted out of office in the midterms.

Who Is The Threat?

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In 1787, Benjamin Franklin responded to a question about the new Constitution with the phrase “a republic, if you can keep it.” Our Founding Fathers envisioned a country with a weak central government and strong state governments. In the early 1900’s a number of things happened that paved the way for a strong central government and weak state governments. The year 1913 was a banner year for those who wanted a strong central government—federal income tax was passed, the federal reserve was created, and the direct election of U.S. Senators was passed. The direct election of U.S. Senators meant that the Senators were no longer subject to recall by their states if they did not represent their state. If a Senator sponsored a bill that would harm his state in some way, the state legislature would recall him. Woodrow Wilson was President when these three things happened. Signing these three things into law significantly shifted the balance of power in America from the states to the central government. The Inflation Reduction Act would never have passed the Senate if Senators were appointed by their states rather than elected.  One illustration of the growth and centralization of government is the fact that in 2023, twenty-five percent of all jobs created were government jobs. We are also in a situation where the majority of our laws are not laws—they are regulations passed by unelected bureaucrats. Any law passed by Congress was probably written by lobbyists. Our tax code is a shining example of what lobbyists can accomplish. According to the Tax Foundation, “There’s the literal statutes that Congress has passed (Title 26 of the U.S. Code). The Government Printing Office sells it spread over two volumes, and according to them, book one is 1,404 pages and book two is 1,248 pages, for a total of 2,652 pages. At perhaps 450 words per page, that puts the tax code at well over 1 million words. (By way of comparison, the King James Bible has 788,280 words; War and Peace runs 560,000 words; and the Harry Potter series is just over 1 million words.)”

The bureaucracy that has been ensconced in America in the past one hundred years or so does not want to give up the power it has co-opted. The biggest current threat to that power is President Donald Trump. He won’t be able to undo a hundred years of unconstitutional behavior in four years, but he will be able to make a beginning. President Trump is a serious threat to our own entrenched bureaucracy, and they are not going to give up their power easily.

President Trump has been accused of being a ‘threat to our democracy.’ First of all, we are a Republic–not a democracy. Secondly, the only threat that President Trump poses is a threat to the entrenched bureaucracy that has perverted the ideas that our Founding Fathers tried to enshrine in our government.

The Unspoken Legacy Of President Obama

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On Monday, The Daily Signal posted an article about President Obama’s legacy. It’s something that the press has not really highlighted.

The article reports:

In President Barack Obama’s second term, the Senate has confirmed more than twice the number of judicial nominees than were confirmed in President George W. Bush’s second term. This is due mostly to the fact that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., succeeded in eliminating the filibuster for judicial nominees (excluding the Supreme Court, at least for now) in November 2013..

The chart below illustrates how the elimination of the filibuster has impacted the nomination process:

Infographic by John Fleming

I am not a big supporter of the filibuster, but I am also not a big supporter of stacking the courts with judges with a political bias. That is what has been going on. Since many of the problems with ObamaCare will be decided in the courts, the Obama appointments to the lower courts could easily move America further to the left than Congress would have been able to do. Our Constitution was designed to create a representative republic. The idea was that laws would be made in Congress. People could hold their Congressman accountable and vote him out of office if they did not like the laws he supported. (Actually, that is not totally true. Initially, the House of Representatives was elected by the people, and the Senators were appointed by the state legislatures. In 1913, Congress passed the 17th Amendment, which called for the direct election of Senators. Up until that point, the state legislature could recall their Senator if he was not supporting bills that were in the interest of their state. The direct election of Senators changed the balance of power in the U.S. government and seriously diminished the power of the states against the much larger federal government.) Unfortunately, we have now reached a point where our courts are making laws. As the courts lean left, we may find ourselves living in a country with a very different form of government than what the Founding Fathers envisioned.