17th Amendment

Over at the NYT, political columnist Matt Bai on Wednesday offers up his take on the recent calls to repeal the 17th Amendment.

We blogged on Tuesday a different NYT piece about the 17th Amendment, which changed the way U.S. Senators are elected. Before 1913, U.S. senators were appointed by state legislatures. The 17th Amendment provides for direct popular election of United States senators.

Now, some think we should turn back the clock, put the election of U.S. senators back into the hands of state legislators. The rationale, shortly stated: the old system would reduce the power of the federal government and enhance state rights.

Bai, for one, isn’t a fan of taking power from the hands of many and placing it into the hands of a few. He writes:

It is a fair point that too much direct democracy can be debilitating; witness California and its love affair with the ballot initiative. But just as a practical matter, this notion of appointing senators seems problematic.

Consider the case of Rod R. Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois, who was forced from office for effectively trying to sell a vacant Senate seat — and then multiply that by the thousands of legislators who would, under the 19th-century rules, meet with the same temptation toward corruption.

Putting Senate seats in the hands of lawmakers would not empower states so much as it would resurrect the old-fashioned American political machine — a condition voters in the Internet age would tolerate for about 10 minutes, maybe less.

Still, writes Bai, there’s a message to glean from the talk — that U.S. citizens are, yes, fed up with their political system. They’re tired not just of the nation’s political actors, but the rules in which those actors are elected and govern:

The same thing happened after the 2004 elections, when a group of frustrated liberal academics began to posit that the real problem in Washington was the structure of the Senate, which prevented the urban masses from imposing their will on sparsely populated rural states. (Funny how that complaint has largely disappeared, now that Democrats control 59 seats.)

Having been through a controversial impeachment, a deadlocked election and a divisive war, all within a dozen years, perhaps it is unavoidable that we should now cast suspicions not just on the actors in our democracy, but also on the rules that govern it.