The Useless, Nest-feathering U.S. Senate (since 1913)

The U.S. Senator of 1789 through 1913 represented the wishes of three successive bodies of his state legislators.  He could defy his back-home political base through maybe one term or two terms because they couldn’t do anything about it.  But if he was still being uncooperative as the third wave of back-home legislators came into office, he would be replaced.

The Founders had designed the U.S. Senate to act with a wider perspective than that of the U.S. House.  Legislation had to pass through both perspectives. Then the disaster of 1913 came, when a most misrepresented Amendment XVII was slipped into place.  It completely disrupted the system.  The U.S. Senators became loose cannons on the deck, shooting wildly with no real purpose.

The Constitution had provided for an elections system that divided the electorate into three levels of sophistication.  The grassroots would elect their two-year term representatives.  Those representatives, in turn, would collegiately elect all of the Constitution’s four-year term executives. After which the reps would organize themselves as a legislative body and choose the six-year term senators.  This carefully crafted system was blown apart when Amendment XVII blandly announced that the grassroots will now elect the senators.

Today, the U.S. Senators stubbornly say “No” to whatever the House proposes.  They are doing it to what would have been the third wave of their bosses prior to 1913.  Today, they get away with it with impunity. Not only that, but they have blackmail powers over all their state officials.  The States should militantly nullify Amendment XVII.

A Bitter Historical Note.  Amendment XVII should have focused on the U.S. House, and should have qualified all state legislators to sit in both places.  That would have brought the States fully into their Federation, and would have made whole, the entire dysfunctional system.

It might be interesting to search the archives for some very damning evidence of a possible conspiracy among the ninety-six U.S. Senators themselves to convince the electorate that Amendment XVII was a good idea.  Neither Republicans nor Democrats committed their party to a position on the amendment---which is reason enough to raise one’s suspicion that the “world’s most deliberative body” was deeply involved in gaining its passage.