We’re all used to voting for Senators every few years.  To us, that’s as natural as voting for Representatives, or for the president, or for state or local officials.  But it wasn’t always that way.  As the framers wrote the Constitution, it said, “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.” (Art. 1, Sec. 3)  But in 1913 the states ratified the 17^th amendment, which says, “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote.”  This is a major change.  Whereas for 124 years (the requisite number of states ratified the Constitution in 1788, and it went into operation in 1789) the states had chosen Senators, from 1913 onward the people have done so.

I used to think this was a good thing.  I thought that the more input individual citizens have in all elections of legislators, the better.  But I’ve come to realize that the 17^th amendment, while superficially leading to greater liberty, in fact contravenes a very important balance that the framers wrote into the Constitution.

It’s important to keep in mind what led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787.  Though the United States had secured its independence from Great Britain, it had done so not as a single nation, but as a confederation of 13 states – and they used the term “state” in exactly the same way that one might call England or Spain states.  In essence, 13 independent, sovereign, and separate nations had banded together in order to gain their corporate independence.

The instrument which bound them together was the Articles of Confederation.  Reading this document shows that it is, in fact, a weak basis of union.  It created a Congress, but failed to give that Congress sufficient authority to govern.  If, for instance, Congress saw a military threat, and voted to raise an army to meet that threat, it couldn’t require any state to send soldiers, nor could it require any state to contribute financially to the costs of the army.  It could request that the states do so – but any state which chose not to, didn’t have to.  If, for instance the threat took the form of apparent preparations for an invasion of New York from Canada (which actually happened during the Revolutionary War), Georgia might think that this was no concern of their government, and vote to send neither troops nor funds – and Congress could do nothing about it.

The states, then, were too independent for the United States to be a true nation.  Therefore, a new instrument of union was necessary – and that realization was what led the Convention to vote to keep its proceedings secret, for their mandate was merely to revise the Articles of Confederation, not to create an entirely new national government.  However, while forging an instrument which would create a single nation, they at the same time were careful to limit the national government; they feared, and rightly, for they had experience of such things, an imperial rather than a federal government, one which would dictate rather than govern.

These concerns, then, were in their minds when they came to create the national legislature.  The states needed to be free, the legislature needed to be limited, and the people needed representation (there would be no “Taxation without representation” in this government).  How were they to secure these three aims?

To limit the legislature, they set forth explicitly what it could do, and therefore implicitly stated what it could not do (that is, everything the legislature does not have the explicit authority to do, according to the Constitution, it can’t do; that wasn’t enough, of course, and so the Bill of Rights came into existence, to further and more explicitly limit what the federal government could do).  To represent the people, they created the House of Representatives.  And to preserve the independence of the states, they created the Senate, which would represent the states in the national legislature.

We commonly speak of the balance of power in the federal government.  And when we use that phrase, we think of the way Congress makes law, the president enforces the law, and the judiciary interprets the law.  But that’s not the only balance the framers of the Constitution wrote into their document.  They also balanced the need of the people for representation, with the need of the federal government to have genuine authority, with the need of the states to have representation in the government.

With reference to the 17^th amendment, they balanced popular representation and state representation.  The “lower house” represents individual interests.  Representatives (that is the correct title; all members of Congress are Congressmen, with some being Senators and some being Representatives) answer to individual citizens.  They have specific districts, of reasonably manageable size; they can go back to their districts, get a sense of what those living in that district want, and then return to DC with that in mind, and work in that direction.

Senators, on the other hand, represented – as the Constitution originally read – entire states.  A Senator’s view was not to be local, but statewide.  He was not to heed merely the residents of this city or that county, but the entire state.  New Mexico’s Senators, for instance, under the original Constitution, would both equally represent Farmington and Carlsbad, Raton and Hatch, Taos and Truth or Consequences.  They would represent not merely members of a mostly Hispanic district, a mostly black district, or a mostly Anglo district, but all New Mexicans – and not so much as individuals, but as a state.  Just as a Representative would seek the best interests of his district, so a Senator would seek the best interests of his “district,” which would be the state which chose him.

The 17^th amendment nullified that view of the Senate.  Now, instead of being able to dispassionately look at the entire state, and serve that state, they now have to run for election and reelection just as Representatives do.  They no longer represent states, but individuals.  And so the states, as states, no longer have any representation in Congress.

That’s not a good thing.  That destroys part of the balance of power.  That nullifies the vision of the founders of this country.  And while those founders were not infallible (some, for instance, owned slaves), they were, I think, at least as wise and intelligent as we are today.  In fact, I tend to believe that they were, overall, the wisest and most intelligent group of men this country has ever produced at one time.  We’ve had our geniuses – Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John Moses Browning.  We’ve had our wise men – Ronald Reagan, Calvin Coolidge, William F. Buckley.  But nowhere in American history is there another group of men who were as wise, as intelligent, as committed to their country as the founders of this nation.  And I consider it most unwise to flout their decisions.

I therefore believe that we ought to repeal the 17^th amendment.  We ought to return the states to their rightful place in Congress.  We ought to give them the representation that the founders wanted them to have, and which they have not had for the past 96 years.  And I am not alone in this.  As far as I know neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party has a position on this matter, but the Constitution Party does.  And in that party’s 2008 platform we find this:

The U.S. Constitution, as originally framed in Article I, Section 3, provided for U.S. Senators to be elected by state legislators.  This provided the states direct representation in the legislative branch so as to deter the usurpation of powers that are Constitutionally reserved to the states or to the people.

The Seventeenth Amendment (providing for direct, popular election of U.S. Senators) took away from state governments their Constitutional role of indirect participation in the federal legislative process.

If we are to see a return to the states those powers, programs, and sources of revenue that the federal government has unconstitutionally taken away, then it is also vital that we repeal the Seventeenth Amendment and return to state legislatures the function of electing the U.S. Senate.  In so doing, this would return the U.S. Senate to being a body that represents the legislatures of the several states on the federal level and, thus, a tremendously vital part of the designed checks and balances of power that our Constitution originally provided.

Now I realize that not all conservatives are ready to abandon the Republican Party (though I contend that it long ago abandoned conservatives).  But I believe that the Constitution Party has it right.  I believe that part of the process of restoring constitutional government to the United States is repealing the 17^th amendment, and making the Senate once again the house where the states have representation on the national level.