Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment

The House and Senate were always intended to serve different functions.

If you asked me to name one thing that America could do right now to remedy many of our national problems, my response would be simple.

Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment. Do it yesterday.

The Framers of the Constitution originally gave state legislatures the power to participate in federal lawmaking by choosing senators to represent their interests in Washington. Through a campaign of misinformation, progressive reformers successfully removed that rightful power from the states. It’s high time we gave it back.

When the Constitutional Convention first considered how Congress would be constructed, James Wilson, a delegate from Pennsylvania, proposed that the people should elect their senators, rather than state legislatures. His idea was soundly defeated by a ten-to-one vote. Indeed, scholars have since noted that legislative election of senators “was one of the few non-controversial decisions reached by the Constitutional Convention.” None of the state ratification conventions objected to the proposal either.

Yet in the late 1800s, the Progressive movement turned their ire on this constitutional provision. With their unshakeable belief in the moral rightness of democracy, progressives argued that legislative election of senators led inevitably to political corruption at the state level.

Their revisionist historians painted a picture of a vast political conspiracy in which state elections were regularly bought and sold by local party machines to elect senators that would serve the interests of the elites above those of the people. (For all you film buffs, they argued that the conflict portrayed in the excellent movie Mr. Smith Goes To Washington was the rule, rather than the exception.)