Future Amendment – Restore Federalism

Comments

2 responses to “Future Amendment – Restore Federalism”

1. 

   Reach Upward

   2009-09-15

   After reading more of Zywicki’s thoughts on the 17th Amendment, I have reconsidered my response of three years ago. I now believe that a total repeal of the 17th Amendment would be favorable, even if we did nothing to address the problems that the amendment purported to address.

   Zywicki shows that the ideas that the amendment was intended to reduce corruption in state legislatures, prevent vacancies due to legislative deadlocks, and/or was part of the huge populist wave sweeping the country at the time are nothing more than red herrings. None of these separately nor in combination with the others was the driving force for the amendment.

   Rather, this was driven entirely by special interests. Until the amendment passed, special interests had a great deal of difficulty generating benefits from our system because the costs of influencing enough state legislatures combined with the costs of influencing representatives were just too high. While there was plenty of political patronage, there was nothing like the system we have had since the passage of the amendment, where our entire legislative agenda has pretty much been driven by special interests.

   Many interest groups combined forces to influence enough legislatures to pass the amendment, because it was one thing upon which they could agree. As I have noted previously, many states adopted this method of electing senators prior to the ratification of the amendment. Once the amendment took hold, both senators and representatives were elected by the same pool of voters. This allowed special interests to be able to ply them in exactly the same fashion, substantially reducing the cost to them of influencing legislation.

   In other words, we do not need to do anything to address the supposed problems that the amendment was intended to resolve. But I wonder if simply repealing the amendment would be sufficient, since it is likely that most states would continue to have popular election of senators. A state trying to bring this back under the control of its legislature would run against the grain of many voters. It would be a hard sell to essentially tell voters that the politicians in their state houses are more capable of selecting senators than they are.

   Maybe we would need an amendment clearly specifying the election methodology. But I’m afraid that anything like that, or even just repealing the amendment, would be politically impossible unless supporters did a fantastic sales job to the American voters. Many of the entrenched powers would staunchly oppose it.

   Reply
2. 

   David

   2009-09-15

   That further information from Zywicki makes it very easy to commit to the idea that the 17th amendment should be repealed, but as you say, it would take an exceptional sales job to convince voters to return to having their state legislators select the senators from their state. On the other hand, if it could be done the Senate would be more likely to be supportive of states rights as they would be directly answerable to their state legislatures and state legislators seem to be among the most vocal in advocating for increased power to the states rather than the federal government.

   The more I learn the more amazed I am at the resilience and nuance of the system first designed by our founders – as often as not the changes we have made since then have been steps backward rather than steps forward.

   Reply