A fascinating snippet from a Broder thumbsucker about Bob Bennett:
At the fringe, the movement to purge him took on aspects of ideological extremism, Bennett said. “I was asked several times about my position on the 17th Amendment, providing for the direct election of senators,” he said. “They viewed that as the opening effort by Washington to usurp the power that the Constitution had placed in the hand of state legislatures.”
Have any of you heard of this criticism of the 17th Amendment before? I don’t understand how replacing a vote by a state’s legislators with a vote by the state’s citizens makes Washington more powerful.
Unabogie
I’ve certainly heard about it, but I can’t say I understand it. Maybe it’s something about “states’ rights” and how anything federal is evil (when a Muslim Usurper is in office)?
DougJ
@Unabogie:
Where did you hear about it? Any links to wingers ranting about it?
Derek
Man, who even gives a shit? Not like they’ll vote in our best interests either way.
joeyess
TPM had a piece on this. Naturally the GOP was walking back their support of the Teabaggers when this came out….. fast.
Derek
That said, I think I read an article about this on Slate (or Salon? I get the two confused) months ago, probably before the idea was on the wingnut radar. I can’t find it on Google though, sorry. Maybe I’m remembering the article wrong.
Violet
Here’s a couple links discussing that it is an issue:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/05/tea-party-call-to-repeal-the-17th-amendment-causing-problems-for-gop-candidates.php
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/house-races/95705-tea-party-pushes-17th-amendment-to-the-forefront
Violet
Keith Olbermann did a segment on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9sl45u-MFI
Sly
I suspect that repealing the 17th is merely the most innocuous sounding goal, compared to some of the other amendments that they would like to repeal. Gotta start somewhere, no?
MR Bill
This is deeply weird, because the State Legislatures are hardly paragons of democracy (at least, the saying in GA is “no man or his property is safe while the Lege is in session..”)
Maybe the teabaggers want to ride this hobby horse to create a constitutional amendment. I doubt it would stop at having the legislatures appoint the Senate: probably some term limits would be added and some thing like California’s Prop 13 could be thrown in the mix ‘to limit the size of government’…Then they can begin to restore State’s Rights..
Now I’m scaring myself.
jl
The teabagger stuff on the 17th amendment is crazy.
I don’t think Broder’s column is a ‘thumbsucker’ it is right wing GOP social opinion engineering.
What is the reason for teabaggerism? Awful Washington powergrabs. That is what Broder is reporting from his poor poor good buddy Bennett, ‘more analytical than angry, more thoughtful than embittered’, to whom Broder relied on for ‘gudance’.
Tom Hilton
I had never heard of it until a few months ago, and suddenly it’s a core goal of the
teabaggersDick Armey. It’s some weird shit, is all I can say.Chuck Butcher
I’ve lost my source link but there was Teabagger trouble over the 17th in ID as well. I don’t follow these loons too closely so their reasoning escapes me.
Warren Terra
@Sly:
If they start at the seventeenth and work outwards, they’ll get to the 14th, 15th, 16th, and 19th amendments long before they get to the ones they want to keep. In fact, they probably dream of a world without the 14th, 15th, 16th, and 19th amendments.
Linda Featheringill
I saw the Keith Olbermann segment.
But why would they go after that one? Unless they want to undo ALL of the amendments.
I do have news for them, though. Even if they reinstate black slavery, it won’t get rid of Obama. Nobody in his family tree was every owned by anybody.
Violet
I’ve been hearing about this issue for quite some time. No, it’s not a new thing for the tea party crowd. They want to go back to having the state legislatures appoint the Senators. They say that’s what the Constitution said originally and should be that way. Here’s a link to a States Rights website that discusses how and why it should be done: http://www.nationalstatesrightscoalition.org/2010/01/how-can-we-repeal-the-17th-amendment/
Maude
Now I’ll never dance with another.
jwb
Somehow with direct elections we end up getting Senators who are really just representatives of the national political machine, but if our state legislators do it then somehow we would be free of all that. That seems a weird argument even by the rules of wingnut logic, so I figure there must be something in it about Baby Jeebus that I’m missing.
Steve
The argument is that it increases the power of the states, even if it doesn’t increase the power of individual people.
Little Boots
It does pop up here and there. A caller on Randi Rhodes a few weeks ago was going on and on about it, and seemed honestly almost hurt that Randi couldn’t see how the 17th was the key to everything. Like everything else on the right these days, it seems to be becoming a matter of religious doctrine.
Glenn Beck's Chalkboard
Tenthers are sooooo 2009. The cool kids this spring are the Seventeenthers.
The theory, such as it goes, is that state legislatures are “closer to the people” and there fore less susceptible to the evils of lobbyists and big campaign contributors. I’m not quite sure how anyone who’s ever looked closely at the Texas Legislature might believe this, or why state legislatures are “closer to the people” than the, um, people themselves, but none of this has to make sense.
sukabi
It’s just another ploy to sucker even more folks into giving up their rights… if the selection of a Senator is left to the state legislature, that pretty much leaves it to either the Dem or Repub party bosses to dictate who they want to be the state’s senator… it would nullify any attempts to get a “grassroots” candidate into the Senate and would cement the hold the rich have on the Senate.
Polish the Guillotines
It’s the same kind of fetishism the wingers engage in with the Bible: The content doesn’t matter to them nearly as much as the perceived pedigree. Just another raw appeal to authority (go figure, when you’re dealing with authoritarians).
I suspect for them, any amendment ratified AFTER the signing of the original Constitution and Bill of Rights is inherently suspect since it’s not a pure reflection of the Founding Fathers’ original intent.
Never mind that the amendment process is part of the original document.
David
My understanding of the underlying issue (from reading comments on Wingnut blogs):
The Wingnuts feel that the Senate is the best, or only, route to power left for them.
Or another way; the more truly democratic the government becomes, the more power The Wingnuts will lose.
“Doing away with the Senate” terrifies them.
Mnemosyne
@Polish the Guillotines:
I think you’re right. In many ways, the Tea Party movement is a purity movement, so it makes sense that they want to get rid of any amendments to the Constitution and get back to the “original” document. Apparently the Founders only wrote an amendment process into the Constitution so it could never actually be used.
Little Boots
Also, too, the stranglehold of big corporations on state legislatures is even tighter than on Congress. If I were a CEO pushing a meme on my astroturf organization, this is one I would certainly love to push.
jwb
@Polish the Guillotines: “Never mind that the amendment process is part of the original document.” Yup, the amendment process was the slippery slope that started the slide of this great nation of ours, ruining it before it could even get properly started. I mean, what should we make of Founding Fathers who didn’t even have sufficient faith in themselves to know that they got it immediately right and forever?
Little Boots
Damn those Anti-Federalists! I knew that Patrick Henry was no good, deep down.
Sly
@Warren Terra:
In all seriousness, I find the notion that a group proclaiming itself to be some kind of ersatz guardian of the Constitution while simultaneously calling for the repeal of Constitutional provisions to be highly amusing. I’m somewhat interested if there is some kind of nascent constitutional convention sub-movement. We love the Constitution so much we want to make a new one! Even the Birchers thought that was too extreme the last time the idea was floated in the early 80s.
Of course, I’m not interested enough to wade through the fevered swamp of Tea Party nonsense in order to find out.
New Yorker
@Polish the Guillotines:
Who says the Bill of Rights is OK? For one, it prevents them from burning me at the stake every time I say something bad about Sarah Palin or baby Jesus. For another, a lot of those durned amendments make it much more difficult to draw and quarter without second thought any dusky-skinned guy who might have once sympathized with Hezbollah.
Roger Moore
@Warren Terra:
Fixt. I suppose some of them would probably be happy to keep the 18th and 27th, but I’ve seen people seriously suggest that none of the Amendments since the 12th are legitimate, with the strong implication that they think the country would be better off without any of them.
jl
So, our constitutional order has been destroyed by constitutional amendments passed using a process explicitly described in the orginal constitution?
Not sure that will sell with the general public.
I hope the teabagggers push along this line hard, since I think it will make defeating them easier.
New Yorker
@Glenn Beck’s Chalkboard:
Ah yes, because I know I want the various lunatics in the asylum known as Albany deciding my senators for me.
kay
I think the idea is that state legislatures would then have their rightful power restored, and would zealously guard that from federal interference, so only elect US senators who knew their role:subordinate to the states.
I don’t think it would work like that at all, but I think most (all?) conservative theories don’t play at all well in reality, so it’s just one more impractical theory to me.
I think what you have to get with state’s rights people is they think it doesn’t work because we’re not following the plan.
I had a conservative lawyer tell me once, really angry, “if you knew how this country was supposed to work you would be mad as hell”.
That’s what he meant. That I don’t understand the Constitution, and he does, and it needs to come on out of exile, where I sent it.
John W.
This is what happens when you view everything in terms of:
1) power, and
2) a zero-sum game involving only state governments and the federal government
New republicans strike me as having read Foucault about 5 times too many. It’s just silly at this point
corwin
So it will take 2/3 of the directly elected senators to go along with a repeal of the 17th Amendment that put them in office. Not gonna happen. EVER.
MikeJ
Read Free Republic. I’ve seen whole threads talking about the need to repeal the 19th amendment.
DarrenG
This is a classic hit of West Glennbeckistan.
To fully understand how it applies in the case of Bennett you probably have to learn more than you really want to about the very anti-democratic nature of Utah politics.
The seventeenthers aren’t from the Armey or Palin wings of the teabaggers — they’re somewhere in the nexus of the Beck/Paul demographic.
They aren’t about returning power to the people, but rather to closely captured state legislatures, which in Utah basically means the LDS church. (Texas is another hotbed of seventeentherism for similar, non-Mormon, reasons.)
jwb
@John W.: I think they just read the executive summary.
Chuck Butcher
I know what their bitch is about the 17th but I can’t seem to make sense of it. Somehow I have a problem with their ideas about elitism and lack of representation lining up with this move toward more elitism. I don’t expect a lot of sense but some kind of internal consistency isn’t real unusual even in loonism.
It isn’t as though Sen Joe Schmoe (TX-R) doesn’t get elected by TX either way though voters are a bit less connected to the elites than the Leg. An Armey backing it makes some kind of sense, but those scared spitless of big gov power going for it seems really strange.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I have a friend that likes to bash on that. It’s his feeling that Congress does not defer to the states enough anymore. He also hates not being on the gold standard. But he doesn’t mind Mexicans sneaking across the border because he knows he would do the same thing if he was in that situation.
JG
Yeah apparently this was one of the first anti-federalist outrages perpetrated by dirty hippies. They talk about it all the time on wingnut blogs.
Uloborus
Okay, I have a theory about this. In fact, it kind of ties a lot of Tea Bagger demands neatly together for me:
This is part of their demand for ‘state’s rights’, of course. Why do they care about state’s rights? For the same reason the Maine platform specifies even taking the state out of education. The goal here is small town mentality. ‘No one can come from outside and correct our crimes.’ They’re chopping the world down to one they know they can control, where moral and legal standards are dictated by the people they personally know.
This is just a move in the right direction. Anything which cuts down on the centralized government which says you can’t kick niggers off your lawn, teach your children the bible instead of math, rape your daughters, torture cats to d-
Ahem. Sorry, living in Kentucky again is making me a bit sarcastic about small-town values.
BombIranForChrist
These people reject every word of the Constitution except for the first and original word “We”, because every additional word is an attempt to modify and circumvent the Founder’s original intention of the word “We”.
Suck it, radicalz! We! We! We!
sgwhiteinfla
A few weeks back or maybe last week TPM did a story on how the Tea Baggers are using a pledge to repeal the 17th amendment as a sort of litmus test for Republican candidates. Any that won’t commit to it either won’t be supported or will be actively opposed. In fact in the piece one Republican who had been endorsed by the Tea Baggers said he changed his mind and was mistaken when he agreed to commit to repeal the 17th amendment and subsequently when the Tea Baggers heard about it they withdrew their support.
My initial reaction was WHY IN HELL HASN’T THE DEM ESTABLISHMENT MADE THIS A BIG DEAL?!?!?!?! I mean what person in their right mind in the face of all of these scandals at the state level from NJ to Florida to hell pretty much every where would want those jokers to be able to select their Senators and how in the hell could anyone POSSIBLY sell that as a “populist” position. If people get wind of this they will run, not walk, away from these fools. And although I think Kentucky is probably a lost cause I would LOVE for someone to ask Rand Paul in front of TV cameras if he was for repealing the 17th amendment also.
This is campaign gold and yet hardly anybody has even heard about it. WTF Tim Kaine?!
MikeJ
@Chuck Butcher:
Two words: state’s rights. The whole point is that *states* elect senators, not icky people. They want the supremacy of states recognized, even though we buried that when we kicked the shit out of their treasonous uprising.
aimai
I have the feeling that one of the issues is that the angry white 17ther suspects that he may control his state legislature slightly longer than he and his kind will control the total population of the state. The idea is that Senators elected directly will naturally reflect the popular will of states where one group or another is firmly in the majority–like NY is entirely dominated by blacks and jews, say–but maybe there are states where the population is slowly flipping from majority white to minority white–like AZ. But if you can keep people from voting and you can maintain control of local elected offices you can keep non whites and women and jews and people from excercising their dirty democracy all over your senate pick. Or something. Not to say that the racism is overt, necessarily, but that there’s a “one of us/not one of us” thing going on that is largely unstated because everyone knows that’s what its all about.
aimai
Little Boots
Elitism in defense of corporate America or jeebus blather is no vice ever. The 17th overturned a key part of the robber baron era. Therefore it must go.
Roger Moore
@MikeJ:
But of course. Women should be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. They don’t belong anywhere close to a voting booth*. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same people would love to strengthen the repeal of the 19th by preventing States from allowing women to vote.
*Not that I’m sure that they’re so happy about voting booths. Many of them would probably be happier if we went back to the good old days of public voting, so they and their well-armed militia friends could bully people into voting their way.
burnspbesq
Speaking of campaign gold, what do you think the chances are that Sestak will ever mention that Toomey made his money as a derivatives trader?
Martin
This actually makes quite a bit of sense that its coming out now. The Senate was always envisioned to preserve the interests of the state in federal legislation, and we actually saw a fair bit of that during HCR in what happened in the Senate.
The 17th amendment pushback is directly tied to the AG lawsuits against HCR. The teabaggers view is that the federal government can’t do this to the states, and if the ‘liberal’ Supreme Court won’t stand up for them, then the problem must be with how the Senators are elected such that they are too populist/corporatist in an interest of getting elected rather than cowing to the desires of the state legislature. Now, this is really just shifting responsibility from one popularly elected body to another, but the teabaggers, as much as they contend they reflect the broader population actually recognize that they are weak, and the more they can gerrymander the electoral process, the better off they are.
Remember, teabaggerism like conservatism can’t fail, it can only be failed. If they aren’t being successful, then the system has to be against them. Since the 17th Amendment was ratified just 20 years before the New Deal, they’re drawing a conclusion that it was the popular election of Senators that led to this dramatic lurch to the left, and not the massive failure of an unregulated economy.
KG
I heard about this when I was in law school, six or seven years ago, now… it would come up at Federalist Society events every so often. I always figured it was a fringe thing that no one really took seriously.
The legal argument on it goes like this:
Separation of powers is not just between executive/legislature/judicial but also between state and federal. By having Senators responsible to the state legislature, in theory, the Senator would be more responsive to the concerns of the “local” governments. Then there would be some random references to the federalist papers. Some would even argue that by taking out the cost of campaigning would make the Senate better because they wouldn’t be beholden to special interests. Of course, prior to the 17th Amendment, there was nothing preventing the states from allowing voters to elect senators rather than it being done through a vote of the legislature. Nor was there any talk of what happens when you have a bicameral legislature whose chambers are controlled by different parties.
It’s really all about state sovereignty and a rejection of the contemporary (read: post-New Deal) federal scheme. The most vocal proponents are the one’s who also want to overturn Wickard v. Filburn and severely limit the scope of the federal government’s commerce power. While I’m sympathetic (not as much as I use to be) I think it’s foolish to try and apply a system created as a compromise to the pre-industrial world to the post-industrial world we live in today.
Polish the Guillotines
@Mnemosyne: Yeah, the purity aspect is a big part of the equation. But when you look at the amendments that passed after the Civil War, you get a real taste of the teaparty mentality. These are the amendments that begin to open civil liberties to blacks and women, while slamming the door hard on the South for rebelling by exerting some federal primacy over the states. And for good measure, you get the establishment of the income tax and the outlawing of poll taxes.
It’s all the stuff they either bitch about ad-nauseum or dog-whistle when they think no one else is listening.
Litlebritdifrnt
this reminds me of this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSGvqjVHik8
Mark S.
The first I ever read about this was about five years ago on either Lew Rockwell or some other hardcore libertarian site. I remember it distinctly because I read the article several times because I was sure the author was really talking about the 16th (income tax) until I gave up and accepted that these loons were really bent out of shape over direct elections for Senators.
Rosali
My theory- More voter suppression efforts. They can stick their foot in the door with this change in the method of elections and then they can tinker with proportional representation laws, institute literacy tests and English only ballots and enact ridiculous ID requirements, etc.
Chuck Butcher
@MikeJ:
I understand the words, it is the lack of internal consistency that boggles. If you oppose power why promote putting more power in its hands? It isn’t as though people generally love their state leg, mostly they don’t trust them any more than they trust Congress. State leg hits people right exactly where they live rather than the more generalized impact of the Fed.
Mostly these loon movements hold together with their internal reasoning (whatever you think of it).
Martin
@sgwhiteinfla: Why bring it up now? Nobody is even campaigning yet.
Davis X. Machina
You can’t say much for the intellectual coherence of a movement that has factions simultaneously militating for repealing the 17th amendment and claiming there’s a recall mechanism for US reps.
Because the People simultaneously need to be removed from the process and more involved in the process. At the same time.
My brain hurts.
Fern
@MikeJ: I hope this is a joke and my snark-o-meter is due for re-calibration.
Martin
@Chuck Butcher: They don’t oppose power. They only oppose power that they don’t agree with. Fuck, that’s the whole schtick of the teabaggers – all government programs that I don’t personally benefit from should go. That’s it – it’s all about consolidating power that they agree with. It’s not an ideological movement even as honest as modern conservatism, its purely and completely self-centered.
sgwhiteinfla
@Martin
My opinion is this, you punch people down as far as you can as soon as the campaign starts that way they have to work all the way back up by the time November comes around. If you allow them to hang around then there is a huge chance that bringing it out at the end will just be seen as a hail mary and folks will already have made their mind up. If you convince folks that all Tea Party candidates are crazy this early then that bell will never be unrung. There won’t be any way for them to convince people they aren’t crazy once they hear about this repeal the 17th amendment bullshit. And what recourse will they have? If they back away from the pledge the Tea Party will back away from them. Its a win win for Dems running against them IMHO.
Separately Rachel Maddow just had Rand Paul on and to say it was an Epic Fail on his part is being far too kind. I imagine that segment will be the makings of plenty of campaign adds and I also imagine whomever in his campaign who booked him on the show has already been fired.
Nimm
@Violet: From that website: “This also reduces the free democratic choice of the selecting the Senate, since money and popularity weigh more heavily now than statesmanship”
Talk about pretzel logic. Giving citizens to vote directly for senators is a REDUCTION of their democratic choice, since, uh….voters don’t vote the way we think they should.
“You don’t get it. You’re MORE free being behind bars, because now you don’t have to worry about being hit by a car! Which you totally would have, since you insisted on crossing streets all the time.”
Little Boots
Actually I wish a state or two would try out proportional representation.
Chuck Butcher
@Martin:
I understand their selective outrage. It isn’t new on the left or the right.
ed
If you wolfed down a big bowl of peyote and chased it with a quart of 30-weight motor oil, you might understand.
burnspbesq
In which Larison understands the reasons for Paul’s win in Kentucky better than anyone else on the right.
http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/05/19/hawks-make-themselves-into-caricatures/
Little Boots
For all the laboratory of democracy shittalking they really are all drearily the same for the most part.
frankdawg
So a movement that is supposed to be populist goes after an actual populist improvement in the constitution for some twisted reason.
This really is like the Civil War, the wealthy, connected power elite get morons and schmucks to actively work against their own interests to further the interests of the wealthy and well connected. The more things change the more they stay the same.
Martin
@Fern: It’s not. Bottom line – all of these social programs and abortion rights and so on are due to women voting. Women overwhelmingly register Democrat, men Republican, and because of that women are biased and can’t be trusted to vote responsibly. It’s pretty much that simple.
Uloborus
@Nimm:
To them, it is. It means their votes have to be counted with the votes of everyone else across the state. I mean, in the end that happens anyway, but the Tea Bag community is all about perception and knee-jerk reactions anyway.
cat48
Rachel just interviewed Rand Paul. I really don’t think I care for him. Govt should follow equality laws but not private businesses is what I think he believes. Guess we need govt banks, lunch counters, etc to avoid discrimination. Talk about BIG govt.
Little Boots
Bingo frankdawg
Polish the Guillotines
@frankdawg: I think that’s part of the way there. It’s more like a kind of Objectivist-Feudalism, in which the only thing preventing the teabaggers from realizing their inner Galt is that we serfs aren’t dutifully playing along.
Chuck Butcher
@cat48:
What you got to see was the collision of Libertarianism with reality and the usual horseshit engendered in that collision.
DougJ
@Chuck Butcher:
Yes, exactly.
kay
@frankdawg:
I think they’re naive about state legislatures. Nothing pure about what’s going on there. If anyone should know that, it’s conservatives. State legislatures were an integral part of the conservative Plan to Take Back Government over the last thirty years, and then hand it directly to moneyed interests.
Martin
@Chuck Butcher: No, not new, but neither the right nor left makes it the basis of their ideology. Both left and right stake their positions largely on what’s best for the greater good. There’s all kinds of muddying of how that actually hits the road, with all the ugliness that comes with that, but what is the teabagger ideology? Basically it’s that the voting community elected someone that doesn’t reflect their personal desires, and therefore the official, the voters, and the process are all flawed/corrupt/illegitimate.
They’re people that believe in democracy so long as only they are the only ones with votes. It’s what happens when ‘epistomological closure’ turns into a movement.
Little Boots
The question is who “they” is, Kay. Who is really pushing this stuff. When did it startand how? Cherchez le corporate whore?
Fern
@Martin: I find that unfathomable – that people in this century would talk seriously about disenfranchising women.
Every time I think that Americans can’t surprise me any more, something like this comes along.
Uloborus
@Martin:
Yeah, also basically true. It’s the classic tribalist argument. There’s no legitimate way for our side to lose. It just can’t happen. If someone else wins, they’re cheating and the system should be done away with in favor of whatever makes us win, because our winning is *right*.
Martin
@Fern: Why? How is it any different than the repeated efforts to disenfranchise minorities or other populations?
PaulW
It’s part of the whole “Give power back to the states” meme that the Far Right obsesses over. They seem to think that by taking the right of voters to directly elect Senators and shift it back to state legislatures, it will shift the balance of power from the Fed to the States.
Problem is that, as always, the wingnuts don’t know their history: THERE’S A REASON THE 17TH AMENDMENT PASSED. It had everything to do with state legislatures being corrupt and gerrymandered to where a party that was really in a minority still controlled who got to serve as a Senator. Not to mention the reports of bribes and favors in exchange for getting to serve as a US Senator for a term. And worse of all, in some cases state legislatures were so tied up in their own corruption they didn’t even send any Senators to Washington.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#History
“After the Civil War, the problems multiplied. In one case in the mid-1860s, the election of Senator John P. Stockton from New Jersey was contested on the grounds that he had been elected by a plurality rather than a majority in the state legislature.[1] Stockton asserted that the exact method for elections was murky and varied from state to state. To keep this from happening again, Congress passed a law in 1866 regulating how and when Senators were to be elected from each state. This was the first change in the process of Senatorial elections. While the law helped, there were still deadlocks in some legislatures and accusations of bribery, corruption, and suspicious dealings in some elections. Nine bribery cases were brought before the Senate between 1866 and 1906, and 45 deadlocks occurred in 20 states between 1891 and 1905, resulting in numerous delays in seating Senators. In the worst case, Delaware failed to elect from March 1899 to March 1903; by the end of this period both of Delaware’s seats were vacant for two years.[2]”
and that’s why people pushed for the 17th Amendment. And that’s why we shouldn’t repeal it and go back to a corrupt practice.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Here’s a piece from 2004 from NRO. Basically it’s a “states rights” thing. I say they run with it because only a tiny rump of fanatics is going to get any traction out of “states rights”, and our duskier brothers and sisters will all recognize it for what it is.
srv
Clearly, our Founders were all wrong when they thought a popular demagogue pandering to the State’s masses would be worse than an established and experienced selectee of the State’s Legislatures.
I have no idea why they thought that.
Little Boots
and I think that’s precisely why it’s being pushed by the truly influential people who are pushing it, or is that too conspiratorial.
KG
@Davis X. Machina: oh for fuck’s sake, from the link you provided:
No, it is not a matter of controversy. The Supreme Court has effectively ruled that states cannot recall federal officials. There’s even a case that explains it: US Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton 514 US 779. The Court even took the time to point out that recall provisions were considered by the Framers and explicitly rejected. And then they said it again in Cook v Gralike 531 US 510.
People cannot be this incredibly stupid, could they?
Davis X. Machina
The Supreme Court has effectively ruled that states cannot recall federal officials
I believe the approach is to keep on suing until you get the result you want. Eventually you will hit a court that has Correct Thought.
Worked for the 2000 election.
Fern
@Martin: Because voting rights for women is such a long-establish practice in America and in many other parts of the world. Silly me, but I would have assumed that by now it would be an unquestioned principle.
ETA – are there moves afoot to disenfranchise racial minorities in this way – I mean legislatively, or through repeal of constitutional amendments or human rights legislation? – as opposed to making life different wrt registering or access to polls etc.
kay
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.):
Oh, I agree. They should go with it. People will love it when tea baggers disenfranchise them, and turn Senate selection over to their statehouse.
Because everyone knows their state representative, and trusts them, right?
Fully half of this country couldn’t name that person, I’ll bet.
Nimm
@Little Boots:
I dunno that the idea is being pushed by any “truly influential” people; I’ve only ever heard murmurs about it from lunatics.
I lump the whole thing in with the “gold trim on flags in a courtroom means maritime jurisdiction, so you can’t be convicted by any court that has a flag with gold trim” militia nonsense that first got exposure back in the 90s.
Honestly, it seems like just groupthink. Someone comes up with this weird idea, but manages to sell it to some angry gullible types, all of whom then think they are very clever, outside-the-box thinkers for being “in” on what a devious and devastating thing has been lurking right under our noses this whole time!!
Felonious Wench
To anyone who thinks this is a good idea, I present the Greatest Hits of the Texas Legislature, Modern Era:
Bo Pilgrim passing out checks on the Senate floor whilst dressed in a chicken suit.
The attempted ban of any sexual position other than missionary by our exalted representative of Pampas….including by married couples.
Our newest brain fart, the Bring Your Gun to Work Day legislation that just passed.
We call the Lege’s visitor gallery The Owner’s Box for a reason.
liberal
@Little Boots:
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
Though I’m not sure I’d restrict that to “big corporations,” but rather say that more generally state legislators are in the pocket of the business class much more firmly than the federal legislature.
Little Boots
I guess I see the whole tea party thing as such an astroturf con game. Maybe you’re right Nimm, but these ideas percolate, usually in fairly well funded organizations like the Federalist Society, until the time is right and enough goobers can be brought into it. Maybe that’s too mechanistic, but it does seem that everything that rises to the surface tends toward corporate power.
MikeJ
@Fern: Less than 100 years is not long established. One good constitutional convention and it could be gone.
burnspbesq
@KG:
That’s a rhetorical question, right?
The Moar You Know
Good lord, I can’t believe every single person here has missed the point.
Forget the arguments. Why is Dick Armey’s Freedom Works pushing these people to agitate for the repeal of the 17th amendment?
MONEY.
It is a hell of a lot cheaper, and more profitable, to buy off a state legislature than to have to put all that work and money into one of those fucking elections, and you don’t even get a guaranteed outcome! Now that’s a BAD INVESTMENT.
Armey wants to remove the element of chance from it. And this is a twofer – pay your money, you get both a state legislature voting your way and two Senators voting your way for a lot less money and effort than you’d expend otherwise. This is what enabled the robber barons to get so big and to own the entire political process, and why they enacted the 17th in the first place.
EDIT: I see Little Boots got it as well.
Ruckus
Fewer people to buy off.
A better chance they will stay bought off.
Backroom deals are a lot easier to get away with.
No need to rig elections.
No need to spend copious amounts trying to convince people to vote against their own best interests when you can’t rig elections.
Money. Profit. Everything else is window dressing.
ETA Damn.Moar @96 beat me to it.
Nimm
@Little Boots:
Well, that certainly could be. So we get to wait and watch, and wonder if we’re dealing with bona fide lunatics, or just a shadowy, monied conspiracy.
Fun either way!
MikeJ
Just out of curiosity, anybody have a source for state by state breakdown of the leges, dem v gop?
kay
@Little Boots:
I don’t think it’s way out there. Business interests have certainly co-opted state judicial elections, in profound ways no one seems to notice or care about.
It’s easier to get a state-level bought and paid for person in, and that person doesn’t get the sort of scrutiny that national politicians do. I was amused when the whole national media were crowing that Illinois (Chicago) is corrupt. There’s lots and lots of that at the state level. New York, for example. There’s about one massive state-level corruption scandal a year and we only see those that percolate to the national level, unless we live in the affected state. I don’t think Illinois is outstandingly corrupt, and the media SHOCK and HORROR there struck me as bullshit.
Little Boots
Yup, it’s been a fun ride for about 150 years now, Nimm.
gocart mozart
Simple, state’s and corporations have more rights than people DougJ you big silly.
Lev
@MikeJ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_legislatures_in_the_United_States
Basically, if my calculations are correct, electing senators by the legislature would yield at least 54 Dem senators, easy. Assuming split legislatures elect one of each party, that gives a total of 62 Democrats in the Senate. Admittedly, a good portion of those are likely to be Dixiecrats since the Dems still apparently control the legislatures of Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. But the ‘baggers clearly don’t know what they’re talking about.
MikeJ
@Fern:
The 19th Amendment, Was it the Beginning of the End for America?
And many, many more hits if you google that site searching for similar stupid.
Martin
@Fern: Sure there are. They aren’t nearly as direct as a repeal of the 19th amendment, but how many states ban felons from voting? VA gov suggested a literacy test for felons to vote again. There are repeated efforts to ramp up the documentation requirement to vote when there is NO evidence of systemic voter fraud. The AZ law is just part of that effort. How many AZ latinos are looking forward to the Nov elections when they’re probably expecting to have to present their papers just to vote? Remember, you can sue public officials (such as poll workers) that fail to ask for the paperwork, and you know the GOP will have a lawyer in every voting district.
gocart mozart
http://repealthe17thamendment.blogspot.com/
And from wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Calls_for_complete_repeal
JasonF
As others have noted, “Repeal the 17th Amendment” is a state’s rights dogwhistle mixed with a financial conservatism dogwhistle (if Senators weren’t elected directly by the people, the theory goes, they wouldn’t have as strong an incentive to vote for expensive programs).
What these idiots missed is that the 17th Amendment was passed for very real reasons. In the first place, people like Democracy and want to actually choose who represents him.
In the second place, before the 17th Amendment, state legislatures that still directly chose Senators tended to wind up hopelessly deadlocked — there were periods of months or even years when states had vacant Senate seats because the state legislature couldn’t agree on who to send.
In the third place, if state legislatures selected Senators, the partisan composition of the state legislature would become the over-riding issue in state elections. Nobody would vote for the candidate with the better position on local issues — they would vote for the guy who was going to send a D or an R to Washington and that’s it.
For these reasons, byt the time the 17th Amendment was ratified, most states had already gone to direct election of Senators. In these states, the legislature was a rubber stamp for the results of the election the same way a state’s electoral college delegation rubber stamps the results of the presidential election.
Dork
If this is true, yowsers.
Rand Paul is a much, much crazier batshit crazy MoFo that I ever dreamed. How a guy openly against the Civil Rights Act gets into the Senate would be simply unreal.
redoubt
@PaulW: This. Or see this cartoon: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/2627563/Hulton-Archive
EDIT: The railroads once were bigger than Wall Street.
Jay C
I think the commentators who have touched on the “power” aspects of the Seventeeenthers are on the right track: leaving aside all the high-flown Constitutional mumbo-jumbo, and the noble-sounding “states’ rights” boilerplate, what’s left, IMHO, is a pretty straightforward attempt at a structural power-grab by the extremist wingtard teabagger fringe. Sort of along the lines of: extremist wingtard teabaggers take over State Legislatures out in the Heartland of “Real America” via
implicit threats of violencetheir superior organizing skills; extremist wingtard teabagger Legislators make sure that they elect only extremist wingtard teabagger Senators in perpetuity. A perfect circle!Sly
@MikeJ:
33 Lower Houses and 29 Upper Houses controlled by Democrats (27 Full Control). Nebraska is unicameral and doesn’t have any mechanism for party caucuses, but there are more “unofficial” Republicans.
Calouste
@Little Boots:
I wouldn’t think that is to conspirational. In most states it is a lot cheaper to bribe a bunch of state reps than it is to run a senatorial campaign. Not to mention that a lot of state legislatures are gerrymandered to the hilt.
Martin
@gocart mozart: Well, I think you’re two steps ahead of the teabaggers on this. I suspect that when they get in their little klatches they draw the same positive stereotypes of the community they live in that we’re sloppy about drawing as negative stereotypes. If the teabaggers in Kentucky think that Obamacare is a socialist plot, they assume that’s a widely held view there and that it must be people not from there that are so stupid as to support it. So the easy first-order move is to pull control of these people closer to home.
If you come from a state with an AG suing to block HCR, its pretty easy to draw the conclusion that it’s a widely held view in your state. After all, you have evidence from an elected official right there. If you put those same people in control of the Senators, problem solved.
Yeah, it’s horrifyingly simplistic, but I’ve seen that kind of reasoning drawn out by the teabaggers time and time again.
gocart mozart
@MikeJ:
From the comments at MikeJ’s Freeper link and holy WTF.
Martin
Bah, fucking moderation. I let a soçialism slip through…
FYWP, and FTFY for good measure.
Lev
@gocart mozart: Supposedly, that Coulter comment was supposed to be a joke. I can never tell with ol’ Ann, though.
kay
@gocart mozart:
I think they should run on that, too. I am loving the new Republican platform. Are these two the most popular proposals? “Vote for me and I’ll make sure you never vote again”.
Fern
@Martin: Okay, I take your point. But I’m still boggled.
Chuck Butcher
I don’t know about the idea that the plutocrats prefer losing the 17th. The proposition that it is cheaper to buy a plurality of a state leg versus owning a single Senator is kind of suspect. An individual state seat race might be cheaper but do the multiplication and then there is the issue of “small” state Senators like AK or MT or…
Big population states don’t run cheap races for state seats and even a state like OR isn’t actually cheap.
Keith G
@Felonious Wench:
No.
ManicDepression
Would be funny if not so sad.
It was 75% of the state legislatures that ratified the amendment.
These people are seriously fucked up.
And, to quote Creighton…”Fuck you fucking fucks”
gocart mozart
@Dork:
Tis true dork. Paul was on Maddow tonight and she asked him that question five times. He had a heck of a time answering it. He danced around it four times. His “best” answer was his 5th when he said that he beleived descrimination is repugnant and if federal $ is involved it should be illegal but if no Federal $ then it is not the Feds business. In short, he said he agreed with 90% of the 64 CRA, but not the “no blacks at lunch counters” portion on the basis of the free speach rights of private business.
Chuck Butcher
@gocart mozart:
It was messy because the implications of what would happen interfere with his Libertarianism mantra. The assurance is that “free markets” would prevent such a thing because people would go elsewhere. History is not his friend – or any kind of sense, either. But hell, that’s Libertarianism.
Alex
Man, if only Rand Paul was running in a more liberal state. I still he think he could lose if he keeps this nonsense up.
Uloborus
Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the wealthier libertarians and their elected puppets think the 17th amendment should go because it’ll make corporate/government bribery easier, but this isn’t really their movement, is it? It’s something the low level Tea Party idiots are pushing. The Teabaggers have *taken over*. They’re leading rather than being led.
In this case, I think they like corruption because they simply assume it will serve their local interests and their local moral standards. It’s like if you tax the rich they assume it must include them, even though they’re dirt poor. They’re very wishful thinkers, and all they know is that this system is letting those dirty liberals in the big cities have votes equal to their own.
kay
@Dork:
Freedom of association is a new one on me. Conservatives object to the Civil Rights Act based on their narrow interpretation of the commerce clause, or that was the traditional wacko theory, as I understood it.
Rachel Maddow is the best interviewer on television, in my opinion. She gets wingers to say too much. They can’t help themselves.
handy
@gocart mozart:
That’s just one of several head shakers. Another one stated explicitly that voting rights should only be given to land owners (and that excludes condo and townhouse owners) with a minimum household income of $500K. These people seriously worship mammon.
MikeJ
@Chuck Butcher: His followers wouldn’t want to do away with the civil rights act if they didn’t think it wouldn’t lead to discrimination. If nothing were to change, why would they want to change it?
Michael
Over at FReakville, they’ve been whimpering about 17th sufferage since 1996. It is a particular favorite of KKK shill Alan Keyes.
Drive By Wisdom
Rand Paul is not against the Civil Rights Act. He distinguishes between public and private, strongly supporting the former, not supporting the latter. This is what is called consistency in Libertarian philosophy. Not that anyone here or at the Daily Kosmune has ever had to make a payroll, or ever could, I am sad to inform you that discrimination occurs all the time, for all sorts of reasons. Against black, brown, white, redneck, Aggie, Christian, short people and everything in-between. Rather than accept that for what it is and try to find a local solution, as always, liberals believe the only answer for every problem is to make a federal case out of it.
cmorenc
The idea behind repeal of the 17th Amendment is not just extreme right wing ideological, but also does have a cunningly rational strategic benefit to them as well. No state with a GOP-dominated legislature would ever send a Democratic senator to Washington. Also, more of the smaller, less populous states have GOP-dominated legislatures, and they get at least two and only two US Senators, just like the largest, most populous states. Those two facts combined would make it far more difficult for the Democrats to ever hold a majority in the US Senate, and far easier for the GOP. Further, even in some larger states like Florida where Democrats and the GOP are highly competitive at the statewide electoral level, have legislatures with significant GOP majorities.
I haven’t done the ground-level state by state math, but I’d bet a dozen donuts that if the 17th Amendment had been repealed four years ago, the GOP would have retained a significant majority in the US Senate in 2006 and 2008.
Alex
Aggie
Yes, Texas A&M fans have suffered the sting of discrimination far too long.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@kay:
Yep. Seventeenthers, go ahead and tell the general public that voting for their Senators is bad for them. I dare you. I double dare you.
Chuck Butcher
@MikeJ:
Actually …
No. Libertarianism is really queer that way, it has as a feature the complete denial of outcomes they don’t propose – whether history denies it or not. It is magical thinking taken to extremes most of us can’t comprehend. In fact, we don’t comprehend it to the extent that we assume something like racism where they see the magical dead hand of A Smith preventing it. (despite Smith’s actual thoughts on unfettered capitalism)
FYIGM is for sure as racist and classist in operation as any KKKer could wish, but… oh fuck I’m not defending them.
MikeJ
@Chuck Butcher: No, they *say* there won’t be discrimination. That doesn’t mean they don’t believe, or hope, there will be.
Lev
@Chuck Butcher: Libertarianism = Nihilism
It’s not even an ethos.
gocart mozart
@Alex:
After Paul, Rachel had on Sestack. Her first question to him was “Do you wish you were running against Rand Paul instead.” He answered “Heh, absolutely.”
Chuck Butcher
@Lev:
Ah jeeze,
I doubt rather strongly that there is anyone here with less regard for Libertarianism than I have.
gocart mozart
Program note: Maddow is on again at 11:00. Paul is the first guest followed by Sestack.
gocart mozart
@Drive By Wisdom:
ATTRIBUTION: Essays. First Series. Self-Reliance.
http://www.bartleby.com/100/420.47.html
jwb
ETA: Oh, never mind the ground has already been covered.
Quiddity
I for one, support the repeal of the Twenty-first Amendment. Bring back the good ol’ days!
Malron
Doug,
there’s a hilarious battle going on between Los Angeles and Arizona right now. Infuriated by the announced boycott by the City of Angels, AZ’s energy commissioner threatened to shut off access to the 25% of electrical power Cali draws from ‘Zona. Not to worry, though; LADWP (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power) general manager Austin Beutner took great pride in reminding the conservative idiot that the plants in question are partly owned by Cali and can’t be shut down.
LADWPwned, also.
FormerSwingVoter
Just for the record: I don’t remember the 17th Amendment being on the Tea Party radar until they realized that Health Care Reform was going to pass. Since a Senate selected by our moral and intellectual betters would never pass HCR, the law must be illegitimate because the 17th Amendment is a secret commie fascist hitler muslim plot that doesn’t count anymore forever.
NickM
@aimai: Not only that, but if state legislatures are like the federal one, rural areas are overrepresented there, too. So now not only would rural states gain additional power, but even rural areas of the rural states. Not some many of those Helena or Billings elists running the show.
gocart mozart
@Malron:
I also love the “Oh yeah. If you won’t buy our stuff, we won’t sell it to ya. So there. How do you like them apples.” strategy. It has all kinds of win in it.
Darnell
I refuse to believe the Democratic party will ever be lucky enough to face a Republican party that features as part of its platform the taking away of Americans right to vote directly for their Senators.
If the GOP is ever dumb enough to take the lead of the farthest fringe of the tea party and campaign on stripping Americans of their right to vote for their own Senator then I will be the first Democrat to march to his polling place with a big, liberal boner.
Joseph Nobles
Hmm. Pulling out my tin foil hat and reading the Wiki article on the 17th:
Are the teabaggers wanting to force a Constitutional convention?
Llelldorin
@Malron:
Awesomesauce. LA responded to the threat by singing the Anhk-Morpork national anthem, “We Can Rule You Wholesale.”
Little Boots
I wonder, Joseph, I see them as manipulated more than anything else, but I wonder if deep down there isn’t some, let’s blow it all up and see what happens motivation.
Little Boots
It is all very primal, and in a sense, I think we maybe have to relive what the Founders actually had to go through. How much freedom? How much control? What do we do about the crazies? What do we do about those who want to control everything, i.e., the corporate masters? We do live in interesting times.
Bostondreams
@Drive By Wisdom:
Yeah, because those local solutions worked WONDERS between 1783 and 1954, didn’t they?
Oh, and when you actually have to work a day in your life, then come back and talk about how the feds oppress you.
See, I can make stupid, groundless assumptions just like you. Ass.
Aaron MacKee's Expiring Contract
@Lev: I would be really surprised if Coulter really seriously thought women’s right to vote should be repealed, but it was a key plank of her schtick at the start of her pundit career. I remember her defending the idea on Bill Maher’s ABC show.
Quasi-related:
1) How much blame should Maher get for giving Coulter and Malkin their big breaks?
2) I think, c. 2025, Coulter will write a memoir in which she admits she didn’t believe a single thing she said as a political pundit, she created a right-wing persona for money and laughs, and she’s actually quite liberal. How far-fetched is this?
Jay C
@Malron:
I like Austin Beutner’s attitude: he closed his comments with:
FormerSwingVoter
@Drive By Wisdom:
Are conservatives really so dumb that they honestly believe that anyone more moderate than Limbaugh must have never held any job in their lives?
Modern conservatism requires a worldview so completely divorced from reality as to be indistinguishable from mental illness.
nitpicker
Neal Boortz rants about the 17th Amendment all the time.
Minnesota Dave
John Dean (yes, Dick’s former White House Counsel, but no reactionary, he) wrote an interesting article on the 17th Amendment, which makes me think that there is much that a progressive might find appealing about repealing. So maybe the Tea Party is inadvertently onto something good despite themselves. Dean’s research indicates that the trusts and powerful business lobbies that so corrupted the US during the Gilded Age through the end of the Progressive Era found themselves often stymied by the Senate and the difficulties in bribing the state legislators that chose Senators in the pre 17th era. Thus the need for a system that bypassed the state legislatures and allowed big business to finance a small class of political entreprenuers who — while appealing to the voters every six years — were in reality directly beholden to their corporate masters. Senate elections cost a fortune and we have suffered the consequences of this financial farce ever since. Do you really think that this process has improved the quality and representative nature of our democracy? For every Wellstone and Sanders we get five Stom Thurmonds, Trent Lotts, and Jesse Helmses.
You can find Dean’s article if you Google his name and “Findlaw and 17th amendment. Here is a snippet of it:
The Cloudy Reasons Behind The Seventeenth Amendment
Before the Seventeenth Amendment the federal government remained stable and small. Following the Amendment’s adoption it has grown dramatically.
The conventional wisdom is that it was FDR’s New Deal that radically increased the size and power of federal government. But scholars make a convincing case that this conventional wisdom is wrong, and that instead, it was the Seventeenth Amendment (along with the Sixteenth Amendment, which created federal income tax and was also adopted in 1913) that was the driving force behind federal expansion.
The Amendment took a long time to come. It was not until 1820 that a resolution was introduced in the House of Representatives to amend the Constitution to provide for direct elections of Senators. And not until after the Civil War, in 1870, did calls for altering the system begin in earnest. But forty-three years passed before the change was actually made.
This lengthy passage of time clouds the causes that provoked the Amendment to be proposed and, finally, enacted. Nonetheless, scholars do have a number of theories to explain these developments.
George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki has assembled an excellent analysis of the recent scholarship on the history of the Seventeenth Amendment, while also filling in its gaps. Zywicki finds, however, that received explanations are incomplete.
Two Main Seventeenth Amendment Theories Don’t Hold Water On Examination
There have been two principal explanations for changing the Constitution to provide for direct election of Senators. Some see the Amendment as part of the Progressive Movement, which swept the nation in the late 1800s and early 1900s, giving us direct elections, recall, and referendums.
Others, however, believe the Amendment resulted from the problems the prior Constitutional system was creating in state legislatures, who under that system were charged with electing Senators. These problems ranged from charges of bribery to unbreakable deadlocks.
Deadlocks happened from time to time when, because of party imbalance, a legislature was unable to muster a majority (as necessary under the 1866 law that controlled) in favor any person. The result was to leave the Senate seat empty and leave the state represented by only a single Senator, not the Constitutionally-mandated two.
What about the “corruption and deadlock” explanation? Zywicki’s analysis shows that, in fact, the corruption was nominal, and infrequent. In addition, he points out that the deadlock problem could have been easily solved by legislation that would have required only a plurality to elect a Senator – a far easier remedy than the burdensome process of amending the Constitution that led to the Seventeenth Amendment.
Fortuntely, Professor Zywicki offers an explanation for the Amendment’s enactment that makes much more sense. He contends that the true backers of the Seventeenth Amendment were special interests, which had had great difficultly influencing the system when state legislatures controlled the Senate. (Recall that it had been set up by the Framers precisely to thwart them.) They hoped direct elections would increase their control, since they would let them appeal directly to the electorate, as well as provide their essential political fuel – money.
gocart mozart
@FormerSwingVoter:
YES
kay
@Drive By Wisdom:
Oh, baloney. What in the hell do you think all the fuss was about in civil rights? Everyone knew government couldn’t continue to discriminate. THAT was the easy part. If you oppose the “private”, you oppose civil rights. It can’t be parsed.
I mean, good Lord. Why do you imagine they were sitting in at lunch counters? Are lunch counters public spaces? It took a federal law, the commerce clause, and an elaborate litigation strategy, just for racial minorities to be able to move around the country unimpeded. Someone might mention to Rand Paul that THAT is a right and a freedom, one he enjoys and they did not enjoy.
Here’s your hero, explaining why he thinks it’s A-OK to ban black people from restaurants.
Xenos
@gocart mozart:
I can haz burqa?
iLarynx
Atlanta radio dimwit Neal Boortz has been ranting against the 17th for years now under the guise of “states rights.” You know what that means.
debbie
@Glenn Beck’s Chalkboard:
Err, who’s closer to the people than the people? Don’t they see they’d be reducing their own power?
gene108
Have a right-wing “friend” on another forum, who wants to repeal the 17th Amendment. I think his logic’s faulty, but he feels by taking the power to appoint Senators from the state legislatures, the Senate got to expand Federal power to encompass areas which should be done at the state level, since the state legislatures wouldn’t want the Feds in on their “turf”.
What gets overlooked is how much of an “old boys network” appointing Senators created and how much more self-serving the political class could be and how much less responsive the Senate would be to people in their states, since the Senators are not answerable to the the people but a powerful local politician.
gene108
@Minnesota Dave:
Do you really think State legislatures in South Carolina, North Carolina and Mississippi would’ve selected more progressive candidates to the Senate? I don’t.
The most powerful and wealthiest moneyed interest in the country, prior to the Civil War was the Southern plantation owner. Southern Senators weren’t putting the brakes on expanding slavery into the new Western territories, which the Southern planters so desperately wanted.
Ryan
Honestly? With how screwed up the Senate has become, I’m willing to hear them out at this point. Could it really make matters worse to have the Senate stick up more for state governments?
Minnesota Dave
@gene108
I am not saying I would vote for repeal necessarily but it is worth looking at. It is very hard for big business to go to 50 different state legislatures to shower them with tabacco or oil money. Much easier to corral 100 senators inside the beltway and lobby them there and feed them a steady diet of campaign cash. Direct election of senators who are financed by special interests may seem like democracy but I think that is often s sham.
And after all, who choses the state legislatures? It isn’t like we don’t have collective power to chose the legislature now do we? Repeal the 17th and power to choose shifts back to the states and away from the beltway and the lobbyists and back to state capitals. To keep your seat you have to convince your legislators and that is it. No more expensive senate races. Bye bye millionaires club. The prospect of repeal I can assure you would absolutely freak out lobbyists (who can now be ignored) and big business in general.
You are right about the South — it was a special case then and often is now — but I imagine that senators from CA will always be protective of agriculture, for instance — and senators from Iowa will always love ethanol, just as a senator from Kentucky will always protect tobacco. But without Phillip Morris lavishing money and influence on the Iowa and California senate races my hope would be that tobacco would be rendered a less powerful force than it has been in the past. And same for ethanol or subsidized California agriculture.
It might also make people take more interest in their local government, which I think is a good thing.
Jinchi
Have any of you heard of this criticism of the 17th Amendment before?
It’s all part of the myth that your local leaders are more responsive to voters than national leaders, because you’re much more likely to find yourself sitting in a bar next to the town mayor than next to the president.
bcinaz
I think this might have it’s roots in the theory of taking over school boards and getting rid reality in the classroom. National politics is expensive and national elections are uncertain. The Tea Party has had no success getting anyone elected to a national office, yet they have been successful manipulating Senators to say and do some really bizarre counter intuitive things, i.e. McCain attempting to run to the right of J D Heyworth. However it might not be impossible to get control of some of those Southern Legislatures and get rid of a senator like, say Lindey Graham.
Bulworth
@aimai: I suspect this is the reason behind any antipathy to the 17th amendment.
Jinchi
Much easier to corral 100 senators inside the beltway and lobby them there and feed them a steady diet of campaign cash.
That’s completely wrong. Lobbyists spend their time and money to prevent federal regulation of their industries. They prefer to work state-by-state. Those politicians are cheaper and local corruption is much more likely to fly below the radar.
Don’t like the consumer protections of the State of California? Move your headquarters to a more “business friendly” place like North Dakota or Delaware. This is why your credit card is probably issued out of Wilmington (regardless of where you live) and why, during the health care debate, the WSJ was lobbying Congress to “Let insurance companies sell health-care policies across state lines”.
Paul in KY
Somehow I think that if the Senate was majority Republican, they wouldn’t be screaming for 17th Amedment repeal ;-)
sparky
sigh. another crap idea backed by crap scholarship.
i’d like to agree with the poster who suggested the Rs have been reading too much Foucault, but i think it’s more likely they’ve been listening to too much Frank Luntz. or is it watching too many reruns of “Mad Men”?
perhaps the teabaggers would do something else to promote their faith in a non-existent past. maybe they could do something like build temples to their pretend ideology instead of playing pretend with history. dealing with this crap is like dealing with “the protocols of the elders of zion”: no matter how many times you smush it, it pops up again, like a stubborn weed. i am not certain who coined the term, but “zombie argument” is apt here.
so, a brief rebuttal:
a. citing yourself does not constitute proof
the Dean piece quoted above cites to a Zywicki book review from the mid 1990s that claims that a public choice analysis demonstrates that major interests wanted the 17th to pass. guess who he cites in supporrt of this idea? Jay Bybee (yeah, that Jay Bybee) and himself.
b. for lawyers, history IS bunk
what you have here is the usual lawyer trick of pretending that history (that is the actual facts) don’t matter when you have a more clever explanation as to what occurred. and if the facts don’t fit, well you just ignore them in favor of your overarching theory. as an aside, never trust a lawyer’s argument about history, especially when, as here, the intent is to prove a theory. see, it’s just a notion to them, and being “different” is a good way to be noticed and get tenure.
c. out damned facts!
here are a couple of those pesky facts: the initiative was taken up in the states, not at the federal level, where it was initially opposed in the senate. next, for this argument to be correct it would require that all of the supporters for the thirty years before it was passed including such favorites of the plutocrats as the Populist Party were secretly working for Standard Oil. i could keep going, but you get the drift. i would be remiss if i didn’t include this famous line from The Atlantic (yes, that one):
H.D. Lloyd, Story of A Great Monopoly, The Atlantic, March 1881, n.p.
d. reality bites
incidentally, the better explanation is that the move towards an expanding federal government was being made, but not that many were paying attention. those ideas would be picked up and used in the 1930s, not the 1910s (excepting some of Wilson’s more reprehensible civil liberties manouvers–like Bush, he did a lot of damage whilst mouthing off about democracy).
anyway, to repeat, this is a clever lawyer trick, nothing more. it is an effort to pretend that history is bunk, in that it can be rewritten at will. an analogy would be the recurring argument that the Civil War was not about slavery.
gene108
@Minnesota Dave:
I think it’s a romantic view of state legislatures. From what I’ve observed about state legislatures and local governments, they are very much hand-in-glove with business interests. Many local offices (and some state legislatures) are not full time positions. People get into these offices and use them further interests of their friends or related businesses.
kezboard
With regard to Rand Paul and the Civil Rights act, it’s a pretty common argument from teenage libertarian types that privately owned businesses shouldn’t be forced by the government not to discriminate, since it’s a bad business decision not to accept money from certain people for arbitrary reasons. You have to have an awfully mechanistic view of human society to buy it, though. Also, it’s wrong that our government both tolerated and perpetuated segregation for such a long time. I think that a democratic government has an obligation to mitigate oppression insofar as it can. Mandating segregation of public accommodation was an important part of dismantling an oppressive racial hierarchy. But it’s pretty clear Rand Paul doesn’t agree with me on that point. I don’t know what he believes the government is there for, but protecting human rights is apparently not an important part of it. At least he’s consistent, though, which is more than I can say for the Seventeenth Amendment business. I mean, I’m from Illinois. The last time our state government was in charge of a senate appointment, it didn’t end well. Unless this is just about hating Woodrow Wilson, I don’t get it.
MaximusNYC
I have never observed or even heard of a state legislature that isn’t opaque, self-serving and corrupt.
This idea is of a piece with all the other paleoconservative fantasies about returning to an idealized past. With their “roll back the 20th century” agenda and their utopian conceptions of the free market, they are a mirror image of doctrinaire Marxists.
OriGuy
How many state legislatures have term limits? I know California does. I can imagine the horsetrading that would go on if the 17th were repealed when a legislator gets termed out and wants to move up to the Senate. It’s bad now, but it would be ten times worse then.
Minnesota Dave
@gene108
I’ll admit that the Minnesota legislature is cleaner than virtually all other legislatures. So maybe I have a somewhat rosy view of what a legislature is capable of. But I do think that we have come a long way from the Guilded Age when legislatures were bought and sold, and my point is that while legislatures will likely continue to favor local businesses they won’t be susceptible to the type of corruption that you find in Washington, where money from any particular industry flows to a senator based on committee assignment. Doesn’t that concern you? If the legislature determined who served, I think that these offices would no longer be the lifetime sinecures that they have turned out to be, and we would get a better class of senator who was not always running around with his hand out.
Again, I am not saying that this is necessarily a panacea but it is not the barking mad concept that many liberal commentators have made it out to be. Money in government and a professional class of politicians is one of the greatest issues of our time, and we should be looking with fresh eyes at novel ways of eliminating excessive money from our political process so that businesses are able to lobby on the basis of good ideas and the public interest rather than whoever has the most cash.
In the 19th century we had a very different kind of economy than the one we have today, and most corruption of legislatures by business happened at the state level. But now that the federal govenrment has expanded its regulatory powers significantly, an industry group that wants national influence goes first to Washington. Its a national economy, and only if we abolished national level regulation do I think we would have to worry about states being unduly corrupted. If you were an oil company and wanted to say lower the caps on oil spill liability for spills in coastal waters, how do you go about this? Its a federal issue. Do you really think that you can do it by running around to the 50 state legislatures? You go to DC. But if the state legislature picked them, and you couldn’t give the senators a campaign contribution, I think they are far more likely to try to do the right thing.
I think that it is highly unlikely that the 17th would be repealed and I agree that the reasons that the Teaparty give for repeal are often reactionary and utopian. But it never hurts to think about the Madisonian bicameralism that has been lost here and weigh it against what we have gained as well in terms of making senators directly responsible to the will of the people. I just don’t think that we have gained that much. Bernie Sanders calls the senate an oligacy — and that it is getting worse.
grandpajohn
@gene108: speaking of Strom Thurmond, If the 17th had not been passed, He would most likely would never have been in the senate. He was elected for his first term by write in voters.
following the death of Burnett Maybank the state party rather than hold a special primary selected its own handpicked candidate,Edgar Brown, to be on the general election ballot. Brown was at the time, speaker of the house and the defacto leader of the so called “Barnwell gang” a group of low state politicians that effectively controlled the state politically. Thurmond, an up state politician then proceeded to mount a write in campaign and the people who were outraged at at the undemocratic selection process, proceeded to elect him by write in ballot. As i recall he is the only senator to ever be elected in this way.
grandpajohn
@bcinaz: With the current level of right wing craziness here now in SC, I am not so sure that the legislature would re-select him. He is getting a lot of static about being a rino and not bat shit crazy enough for the tea partiers.
Jerry 101
Alan Keyes was a big fan of 17th Amendment repeal when he was chosen to run against Obama for the Illinois Senate seat.
It was one of the things that instantly marked him as a crazy man.
The crazies are taking the GOP over.
bcinaz
@grandpajohn: It’s my point. If the batshit crazies took over the legislature, and had the power to select Senators, Graham would be TOAST.
palerobber
sorry i’m late but….
Salt Lake Tribune 2/26/2010
“Utah Senate panel seeks to circumvent 17th Amendment”