It’s probably a little known fact that “we the people” did not always have the right to elect our Senators. Unless you read such documents for fun, you may not be aware that the US Constitution originally left this priviledge to each State’s own legislature to decide. I believe the 17th Amendment passed during Teddy Roosevelt’s Administration, but:
What was the driving force behind this change? And, what are the advantges and disadvantages between these two methods of electing US Senators?
Enfranchising the people gives the popular party more power.
This is one of the ‘Progressive Amendments’, so named because they were pushed by the only successful third party in American history, the Progressives. Many people felt that having the state legislatures select the Senators was undemocratic, and eventually people got elected based on the promise of doing that.
Advantages: Every vote counts equally, so even if the legislature gerrymanders its own seats to gain a majority, that won’t get their candidate elected. Also, though this is more common now than at that time, sometimes we vote for the candidate and not the party: somebody could help send a Republican to Richmond or Albany, but a Democrat to Washington.
Disadvantages: It removes one power of the states over the federal government, and kind of weakens the Senate’s concept of representing states.
I much prefer it, quite frankly. Senatorial elections actually matter now. In Virginia, Republicans have about 53% of both chambers (23/40 and 53/100), but Jim Webb (D-VA) was just barely elected to the Senate.
The 17th Amendment, for the record, was proposed on May 13, 1912, during Taft’s term, and ratified on April 8, 1913, right after Wilson had taken office. It went into effect for the first time in the 1914 election.
As usual, the OP might want to take a look at Wikipedia for the answer to a question.
There were several reasons. Aside from the push by the Prograssives, several of the western states had already adopted direct elections. Another reason was that the state legislatures were wasting an enourmous amount of time electing senators. Another was the whole thing had gotten very corrupt.
Originally, the House was supposed to represent people and the Senate states. After the Civil War, the states lost a lot of power.
Ironically, the “progressives” cited corruption and good ole’ boy syndrome - and special interests. Given the amount of special interest money pouring into Senate campaigns, I’m not sure direct-election is any kind of improvement.
Right, but you only have to buy enough legislators to make a majority for your party, versus trying to fund the entire campaign of a much more prominent candidate.
The problem still remains in the form of governors that can replace a senator that dies or can’t serve, sometimes for the* full term *if a candidate dies unsworn. This is what might happen to change the balance of the senate any day now.
Most states removed those provisions over the years but not all.
We need a stronger national amendment for the direct election of replacement senators.
Before the Progressives, the People’s Party (a/k/a the Populist Party) raised the issue of direct election of Senators. From their 1892 platform:
The Populists wanted the change to give themselves (as a newly-minted third party) a better shot of electing Senators. If there is no direct election, a third party has to first get its politicians elected to majorities in the state legislatures, which would then choose Senators from the party.
But to couch that in nobler terms, the Populists argued that direct election of Senators makes Senators more responsive to the will of the people. It was an era when the people were desirous of progressive reform but ran into many obstacles, not the least of which was a reluctant Senate.
In more than one aspect, the Progressives picked up the fallen banner of the People’s Party.
Actually this isn’t true - it was a unique provision of the last senate’s organizing resolution. When it was formed it was 50 Dems, 50 Repubs, and a Democratic vice president (for two weeks or so) - a democratic majority. The two parties horse traded when they formed the government. Gore would nominally vote with the Republicans so that they could form a majority (in accord with the will of the people, if not the rules of the Senate), but a special provision was added to the Senate organizing resolution for those two years to allow control to switch to whoever held an actual majority at whatever time.
Historically it has not been unusual for a minority party to officially be the Senate majority (and with all the powers that goes with it), due to the vagaries of life, death, and scandal.
(So Lieberman has a lot less power than he thinks)
Not counting the Republicans, of course, unless you consider them just the Whig party in new clothes, which they were not.
Didn’t catch this before.
Successful by what measure? Just curious, since it seems to me the Progressive Party was less successful than the earlier People’s Party. The Progressive Party, as I understand it, only endured from 1912 to 1916 (and was really a shell after 1914).
From Wikipedia:
On the other hand, the People’s Party lasted from 1889 to around 1908, fielding Presidential candidates in each of the elections during that span. The party elected 10 governors (5 on merged tickets; 5 on solely Populist tickets), 6 U.S. Senators, and 39 US Representatives, and gained control of several state legislatures.
And, as I mentioned earlier, many of its ideas were adopted and promoted by later progressive movements, and eventually became the law of the land. (Direct election of Senators, civil service reform, progressive income taxation, grassroots referenda laws, anti-trust laws, etc.)
The only measure by which the Progressives seem arguably more successful is Presidential votes. Progressive Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt got 27.4% of the vote and carried 6 states in 1912, while People’s Party candidate James B. Weaver received 8.5% of the vote and carried 4 states in 1892. In 1896, the popularity of the People’s Party forced the Democrats to adopt elements of its platform and field William Jennings Bryan on a merged ticket.
My brain hurts. The last Senate included 55 Republicans. Even in January 2001, Gore didn’t “normally vote with the Republicans.” Democrats held the Majority in the Senate from January 6, 2001, to January 20, 2001, upon which time Gore was no longer Vice President and his opinion did not matter. The agreement on power sharing reached by Daschle and Lott in 2001 focused mostly on how committees would work if one party or the other gained a true majority, there was no “special provision” that allowed control of the Senate to switch.
And I hope you could name any of the times in history at which a party, without the support of any independents or third parties that would bring about a plurality or majority, exercised the power of the Majority while in fact being a minority.
Actually the corruption of even the greatest Senators during the era of appointments was simply astounding, especially by modern day standards. Even Daniel Webster, one of the giants of the Senate, is known for simply extorting large sums from the Second Bank of the United States. In my own opinion, Webster’s “questionable” ethics would probably make Duke Cunningham blush.
The single biggest disadvantage of it is that it leaves the state governments without any real power in DC. This has been a huge factor in the ridiculous growth of the federal government in the period since its enaction.
A senator elected (and hoping to be reelected) by the state legislature can be expected to act in the interest of that legislature, acting to curb the power of Washington in favor of keeping power vested in the individual states. But a popularly-elected senator has political pressure on him not to act out of an interest for state’s rights, but out of what will sound good to the populace come the next election.
It stands to reason, I think, that at least some of the time, leaving a given issue up to the individual states is a good thing; certainly we do occasionally hear politicians say that an issue is best handled by the states. But the reality is that a senator who consistiently votes against the growth of the federal government will be painted as a “do-nothing.”
To be concrete:
Let’s say a popular groundswell comes forward in 2020 to ban all cigarette smoking nationwide, and a clear majority of the American people are for it. Now Senator Smith might well say to himself “Well, I don’t like smoking; but perhaps a sudden nationwide ban might not be a wise thing.”
If Senator Smith is accountable to the state legislature, he will likely make the argument that cigarette laws should be handled on a state-by-state basis. And if that argument prevails, different states will adopt different laws (and no doubt some will have no ban), and that we can watch to see which laws work best in various states. However, a popularly-elected senator Smith who makes the same stand will be demogogued as being Pro-smoking; he may be voted out of office, or he may go ahead and vote for the ban to save his political skin. And thus we would be plunged into an enormous nationwide experiment.
And if cigarette prohibition sounds like a crazy thing to bring up, you may want to contemplate the fact that the 18th amendment came hard on the heels of the 17th, and that both sprang from the same political movement.
The 17th amendment has been an enormous aid to those who want to increase governmental power, and especially that of the federal government. It has done much to steer the nation away from what the framers intended.
It’s an interesting argument, but I’m not sure I buy any of it.
First, can you say that Senators generally voted to serve individual state interests before 1914 when the change occurred? Now, admittedly that entire era was one in which the federal government had less power and the states more, but it should still be possible to point to examples one way or the other. I think that overall, it would be hard to make a case that appointed senators served the cause of states rights more in the 20 years before 1914 than after 1914.
It was WWII and to a lesser extent the Depression that spurred the enormous growth in the federal government. I can’t see any signs of it earlier, even when you add in a spike in federal power during WWI.
Second, I don’t understand the argument that that a popularly elected senator wouldn’t have an incentive to act for state’s rights. If that’s what the people want, then certainly he has. And did. Look at any senator from the southern states through the mid-1960s. All they did was yell for state’s rights. Why? Because that’s what the populace demanded.
Third, I think you made a Freudian error when you wrote:
Boy, they sure did. That’s exactly what they did. And it was exactly that corruption that caused the entire system to go away.
The growth of federal government in the U.S. was a structural change, meaning that it came about because the world as a whole changed, not because of particular wants or ideologies. It was President Eisenhower who complained of the military-industrial complex, remember.
In a world with increasing and increasingly rapid transportation and communications as well as freedom of movement of families and individuals, the simplicity of a single government and set of laws and regulations will necessarily win out over the complexity of 50 separate sets. Nothing could save state’s rights any more than states could save Jim Crow laws. A single overarching set of rights will always eventually triumph.
Direct election of Senators had virtually no effect on this larger change in the world. It was at best a small symptom of the larger change rather than a cause.
Not counting the Republicans because at that point, the Whigs were getting their asses kicked all over the place. There was effectively one large party, various factions of Democrats.
As to the success of the Progressives, to some extent I do lump them together with other movements, but think of it this way: maybe they didn’t get a lot of people elected, but they did get politicians to implement many of their ideas.
I’ll try to respond within the confines of a GQ thread (and no, I don’t really want to do a GD thread; for that matter i’s probably been done)
Top of my head, no, I can’t think of any specific legislation; though I’m not the sort of person that’s well-versed in early 20th century senate voting records. I don’t see why we should confine ourselves to 20 years; It’s not like anyone is claiming that the amendment led to some sort of sudden, dramatic overnight change. Rather, the claim is that the loss of a check unbalanced the system, leading to long-term consequences.
If, say, the abilty to impeach judges was taken out of the system today, I don’t think we’d see some wild orgy of judicial insanity tomorrow; but I’d be willing to bet that in a hundred years we’d see a more powerful judiciary because of it.
Article and chart.Essentially, we did not go back to pre-WWI levels in 1920, and it’s been rising ever since (following a century of stasis)
I already gave a detailed example of how this might work in my last post.
No, I assure you it was quite intentional. The senator would act in favor of keeping power centered in state capitals. Considering that state legislators are elected, I see no problem with this.
I’m so glad that we got rid of political corruption.
Since modern Senate campaigns require enormous amounts of money, much of which is supplied by corporations, I think it’s fair to ask whether we really think direct elections have given us more integrity. This article argues that the amendment arose because it made special-interest groups more powerful, not less, and notes that the urban political machines of the time were among its supporters. And given that the caricature of the time was of Senators as entrenched, unaccountable fatcats who were given jobs for life, it’s worth pointing out that average senatorial tenure has risen significantly in the direct-election era.
Truthfully, even if there was more corruption, in my book that’s not some sort of open-and-shut end to the argument. Given the choice between a million tax dollars pocketed by a corrupt senator on the one hand, and a billion tax dollars wasted on a boondoggle on the other, I don’t think I’m crazy to prefer the former.
I’ll take the radical position that it probably happened for a lot of reasons. I’ve never said the 17th Amendment was the only one. The 16th Amendment (income tax, and also a result of the progressive movement) was another, as well as larger societal/historical trends.
Interesting that you cite transportation – since motor vehicles is one of the issues where states still have a great deal of power (licensing, registration, etc) and it seems to work OK.
Some things do work better under the federal umbrella; but I see no logical reason why everything must. I suspect if you try really hard, you can probably think of at least a few things you’d prefer to see handled by state and local governments.
You seem to be under the illusion that supporting states’ rights is somehow in necessary conflict with supporting individual rights. This is simply not true. The Senate that ratified the Bill of Rights was a legislature-chosen one after all; they certainly saw no conflict.
You need to take a longer view than just looking at the 1920s. Historical Tables for the U.S. budget [warning: long .pdf]. Look at page 21 for raw totals and page 23 for totals as percentage of GNP (starting in 1930, unfortunately). The numbers are obvious. More money was spent in 1919 than in 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1929 combined. That’s what I would call a spike. The yearly expenditures never equaled that number again until 1942 and then never went below it. Again unfortunately, the chart on page 309 of total number of civilian employees starts in 1940, but it tripled by 1942 and stayed at that level after the war. WWII is the dividing point, and no other.
No, you merely reran Prohibition. But Prohibition came about because state by state abolition of alcohol wasn’t working. Only a national policy could ever hope to be effective. In that particular case, not even a national policy could work but that says nothing about the need for national policies. Segregation had to be a national policy: it could not work if some states could oppose it. Gay marriage will eventually have to be a national policy: people cannot be married or even be in civil unions on a state-by-state basis. The idea that fundamental rights or what is considered to be a crime can be allocated to individual states has always proven to be fallacious. I have nothing against the notion of states as a testing ground for policies. However, that can only work - and I emphasize only - if the state goes beyond the national policy, not when the state is fighting to keep bigotries legal.
Only the most strained and stretched interpretation of my words could possible take “the world as a whole changed” as a single cause.
First, transportation as a structural cause of change has exactly nothing to do with motor vehicle licensing. They are not even in the same world. Second, to limit the discussion to your digression, note that calls for federal databases of licenses and other citizen information have been increasingly created nd increasingly demanded. You can’t run a country with 51 separate look-ups.
I never at any time say that state governments have no place. I say merely that the efficiencies of single government laws, regulations - and databases - has placed pressure on federalizing these items. Not at all the same thing.
This is meaningless in terms of modern-day concepts of government. Every amendment has been ratified (wrong word, but we’ll let that pass) by the Senate. So what. Only the federal government can guarantee individual rights. States cannot do so. States can add extra protections, as I said previously, and states can act when the federal government fails to do so. None of which has anything to do with how Senators reach office.
My claims were
The cite you give (p. 21) says that the budget in 1900-1916 was rising slowly, from $500M to $700M over 16 years. Adjusted for GDP (which we don’t seem to have data for, that sounds pretty much like stasis to me. Then there’s the WWI spike (which I acknowledged) But after the war was over, the budgets never went under 2.8 Billion again.
By “rising ever since,” I did not mean it went up every single year; and yes things held steady in the 2.9-3.2 billion range for a few years; but by the 1930s we had the first 4 billion budget, then the first 6 billion, then 8, then 9. if you don’t see a trend there, we’ll have to agree to disagree.
WWII was also a big dividing line; your assertion that it is the only one seems quite a stretch.
Incorrect. There were dry states, counties and municipalities decades before prohibition; some cities and counties remain dry to this day. The crime problems we associate with Prohibition only came from the nationwide ban.
No, actually, it did work for many years. It was wrong and bad, and it was eventually done away with because it was rightly held to be a violation of the constitution. But much of the country had already ended school segregation even before Brown v. Board. Cite.
I fail to see why this “cannot” be. It’s a knottier problem, to be sure. But here’s the thing: given that referendum after referendum shows the large majority of the country does not support gay marriage, and likely will not anytime soon, wouldn’t you prefer to let gay couples living in progressive states go ahead and get married now, instead of waiting until such future time as the majority of the country comes around? It seems to me that if it is allowed it in some states, with the resulting observation that “Hey, Massachusetts wasn’t destroyed by brimstone,” that would be a powerful help in advancing the cause in other states, no?
You mix two things here. Rights are enumerated in the federal constitution, and you are entirely correct that they cannot be superseded by the states. You are entirely incorrect in saying that what constitutes a crime cannot vary by state; it does and always has.
You seem to assume that in asserting the idea that states have rights, I am somehow arguing in favor of segregation. I am not.
Let me ask you a question: if the positions had been reversed, and George Wallace et al. had been riding the tide of growing nationwide sentiment, and the issue in the 1960s was not about ending segregation in Alabama, but rather that of ending integration in Massachusetts, do you really think he would have held back because he respected states’ rights? Of course not. He was a segregationist, and states’ rights was just the closest thing he had at hand to defend it with.
That patriotism has at times been the last refuge of scoundrels does not, I trust make it in itself a bad thing. So also, the fact that scoundrels have hidden behind the rights of states does not make it therefore an invalid cause.
And again, since segregation was an example of a violation of the constitution, it’s not what I’m talking about. A much better example would be policy toward drug usage, which is neither prohibited nor banned in the constitution.
The perception that illegal drugs were a huge problem led to political pressure on politicians in Washington to “do something,” which led to the nationwide War on Drugs (™). I submit that while there have been some successes, American drug policy over the last 25 years has not been as good as it could be. I submit that much good would have been accomplished if states had had much more latitude to approach drugs as they saw fit. Let Texas execute people for simple possession, let Massachusetts pursue Amsterdam-like policies, let Iowa use a public-health approach, let Ohio legalize some drugs and ban others while Utah legalized everything (and yes, I exaggerate for effect). We would quickly see which policies worked and which didn’t, and states would adjust policies accordingly, and with consideration of what their particular problems were and what sorts of communities they preferred
But whatever the merits of a state-by-state approach to drugs, it is a bad idea for a national politician to advocate. If a Texan politician were to make the case that “I don’t like drugs, but it’s not my place to tell Californians what they can and can’t smoke,” you can guaran-damn-tee that come next election his opponent would brand him as “soft on drugs.”
A senator whose primary concern was with the balance of state vs. federal power, however, would survive. The state legislature would be pleased, because now they, as politicans much closer to their constituients, would have more power to deal with drugs as they saw fit.
Instead, we sent people to Washington with the mandate to “do something,” and they do so using the far blunter instruments available to them: crafting nationwide mandates (sometimes unfunded), creating federal agencies, even using foreign policy and the Military.
I don’t think this has worked well; and I think it would have all happened differently had their been an institutional voice in washington who had the political cover to say that the Federal Government shouldn’t get so involved in the problem.
And yet we have for nearly a century.
And thus we come to the crux of the biscuit: you seem to take it as a given that “single government” is more efficient; and indeed that was exactly the reasoning of the the Progressive Movement that yeilded the 17th.
I would argue that the evidence of the years since is that large, centralized governments are in fact more likely to be inefficient and dysfunctional.
And yet the dominant paradigm of the era is the centralized database.
Your post is for GD and has nothing to do with the topic of this thread, so I think I’ll leave it with that one comment.
