Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment

The Seventeenth Amendment, adopted in 1913, changed the Constitution to mandate direct election of US senators. The process specified in the original Constitution called for senators to be elected by their states' legislatures. Georgia Democratic Senator Zell Miller, who is retiring after his current term, recently proposed in a Senate speech that we repeal the Seventeenth Amendment and return to the original process.

In the debates of the Constitutional Convention there was controversy over the relative power of small versus large states. The solution, creation of the Senate and House as separate bodies, is known as the "Great" or "Connecticut Compromise." The direct election of members of the House of Representatives favored the populous states, while the equal representation of each state in the Senate protected the smaller states from domination by the larger, or by the national government. Since the senators were to represent their states, they were to be elected by those states' legislatures rather than directly by the people.

James Madison, in The Federalist No. 51, explained that "In republican government, the legislative authority, necessarily predominate. The remedy for this inconveniency is, to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them by different modes of election, and different principles of action, as little connected with each other, as the nature of their common functions and their common dependencies on the society, will admit." Giving the two houses such radically different political bases enhanced their value to the system of checks and balances by making it more difficult to control members of both houses at the same time on a given issue, thus limiting the power of special interests.

For many years prior to 1913, special interests had chafed under these limitations. In the first year of the Wilson administration they finally succeeded in breaking the constitutional stranglehold on their power to influence the Senate: they passed the Seventeenth Amendment. After that, all they had to do to control a senator was to throw money into his statewide senate race. That is where we stand today.

An interesting analysis which supports this view of the origins of the Seventeenth Amendment may be found on CNN's FindLaw web site at http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/09/17/fl.dean.17th.amendment/.

Congress has responded to the widely recognized problem of excessive special interest election spending by passing campaign finance "reform" legislation. Their approach limits the free speech of all of us in an attempt to control the abuses of an elite few who have the means to buy elections. Returning to the original process for electing senators would go a long way toward controlling campaign spending without limiting political speech. After all, what would it cost for a state legislature to elect a senator? Virtually nothing, since spending significant money to influence state legislatures would be easily recognizable as bribery.

Senator Miller, in his years in office, has seen firsthand the corrupting influence of special interests over Congress. He attributes much of this influence to the Seventeenth Amendment's direct election of senators. Thus his call for a repeal. I agree with him.