Redstate Weblog: Senate Needs Change

Found at the weblogs Redstate and cross posted on Scioio the Metalcon

After hearing about a couple of insanities coming out of the Senate this past week, it is time for the American people to show their ire by doing one of two things: voting for senate term limits or a repeal of the 17th Amendment and making state legislators select the representatives of the states instead of being installed through direct elections, as was originally established in the Constitution.

So many of our Senators have been in office a long, long time, and consistently fail the American people, and the states they represent, on regular basis. They get drunk and rich on their own power and gladhand each other as they further denigrate the voice of the American people (McCain-Feingold). Time for a change. Get term limits in place or repeal the 17th Amendment.

Comment: Obviously from my perspective term limits are not the answer; repealing the 17th amendment is. Having term limits will only further the problem of the oligarchic power growing in the Senate that has created an imbalance in our government. Term limits only perpetuate the problem, that being the movement to mob democracy verse the intended republican form where the state, as a “sovereign,” has equal representation in the Legislative Branch.

While the author of the weblog has the correct intuition, further understanding of this matter is needed. Start with John MacMullin’s article, Repeal the 17th, that appears on the von Mises Institute website, and Todd Zywiki’s law journal article, Beyond the Shell and Husk of History: The History of the Seventeenth Amendment and Its Implications for Current Reform Proposals. Both are excellent primers detailing the issue. As one delves into the issue they will certainly find the very tool used by the populist that was intended to destroy “the systems of federalism and bicameralism which had previously checked expansionist federal activity.”[i]


[i] Todd Zywiki, Beyond the Shell and Husk of History: The History of the Seventeenth Amendment and Its Implications for Current Reform Proposals; Cleveland State Law Review; 1997.