So You Still Want to Choose Your Senator?

So You Still Want to Choose Your Senator? The New York Times

This is a typical editorial from the NYT distorting US History and the founders' intent.

Few members of the Tea Party have endorsed Rand Paul’s misgivings about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but a surprising number are calling for the repeal of an older piece of transformative legislation: the 17th Amendment. If you don’t have the Constitution on your smartphone, that’s the one adopted in 1913 that provides for direct popular election of United States senators.

Allowing Americans to choose their own senators seems so obvious that it is hard to remember that the nation’s founders didn’t really trust voters with the job. The people were given the right to elect House members. But senators were supposed to be a check on popular rowdiness and factionalism. They were appointed by state legislatures, filled with men of property and stature.

A modern appreciation of democracy — not to mention a clear-eyed appraisal of today’s dysfunctional state legislatures — should make the idea unthinkable. But many Tea Party members and their political candidates are thinking it anyway, convinced that returning to the pre-17th Amendment system would reduce the power of the federal government and enhance state rights.

Read the rest here.

Comment: Mr. Firestone might have spent a little more time researching the facts prior to writing the editorial, however I doubt his conclusion would be any different. This is because there are easily two recognizable groups in the United States at this time; those that wish to control others and those that do not.

Within the framework of government created by the founders our system of federal government was decentralized limiting government control over the individual and the states. The system of federal government that has emerged after 1913 has been one of growing centralization, which controls each of us in ways unimaginable by the founders.

Power was supposed to resided in the states, and it was through the US Senate that the states would exercise its authority. This is contrary to Mr. Firestone's misconception that the founder's didn't trust the voters to vote for their senatorial representative.

However, without going line by line explaining Mr. Firestone's misconceptions and lack of understanding, I will only say that the repeal is very real, it can happen, and will happen. When the post-baby boom generations finally realize the prior generation, these selfish baby boomers, who have saddled them with a debt so large ($1.7 trillion and rising everyday) that it's going to take four to five new generations to pay it off, and when they are saddled with new forms of taxation in the way of "cap and trade," they will return to the structure the founders intended, and the structure that prevented massive deficits. They will repeal the 17th because it will take the full power of the 50 states to dissemble what the statists have created since 1913.