Democrats Haven’t Changed From Their Pre-Civil War Days

Democrats Haven’t Changed From Their Pre-Civil War Days; Redstate

All I can say is that when Matt Yglesias makes statements such as this, in a whiny post about the filibuster [emphasis mine]:

If the framers had deemed it crucial that the Senate operate via supermajority, they could have written that into the constitution. What’s more, it’s not really clear what relevance the framers have here—they wanted an un-elected Senate, they wanted slavery, they wanted lots of things. Last, the fact that some version of this problem has existed for a long time is no reason not to change it. An anti-lynching bill could have passed during the Hardin [sic] administration if not for the filibuster.

is that the education he received left him clueless about the United States and its founders. But while this is damning in and of itself, Yglesias has no interest in actually learning the real reasons behind why the members of the Senate were not originally elected by popular vote or how the founders actually reduced the effects of the institution of slavery in the United States Constitution. Naturally, Yglesias supports the same party that filibustered the anti-lynching bill he mentioned. In addition, Democrats plan on having illegal aliens counted in the upcoming census in order to favorably reapportion House seats for Democrats, even though illegals can’t vote (at least unless they get “registered” by ACORN or La Raza, or via the universal registration legislation being drawn up by…Democrats); there is a similarity in what slave owners wanted at the founding.

Let me address the first point I highlighted. Prior to the 17th Amendment, Senators were not directly elected by the people, but by the state legislatures. There was a reason for this; U.S. Senators represented, and were held accountable to, the states as states. To put it frankly, Senators were accountable to the state governments; it would be elected state officials who would be held accountable to the voters. It wasn’t as described by Yglesias, that U.S. Senators were unelected.

For those who refuse to or don’t understand this, like Yglesias, this was somehow a failure of democracy. It wasn’t; the Founders established a republic instead of a democracy. Because the states themselves were in effect smaller cogs of a big country, it was felt that U.S. Senators were there to represent the states, while members of the House were to represent the people. Even the President wasn’t to be elected by popular vote; that is what the Electoral College is for, a conglomeration of the number of representatives and U.S. Senators for a given state. If the Founders had wanted more democracy at the national level, neither the method of electing the President or the original method of electing U.S. Senators would have been needed. With the passage of the 17th Amendment, direct elections by the people of U.S. Senators is now what is in place (I don’t want to discuss the merits of the 17th Amendment here, although I’m not in favor of it and would vote for its repeal, provided what is put in place is a re-establishment of the original wording of the first two paragraphs of Article I, Section 3). ...

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