Democrats: Republicans Want To Repeal The 17th Amendment!
And they say that like it’s a bad thing, according to Peggy Noonan:
“Thus the new DNC scare ad, which features the usual “Jaws”-like monster music, and then the charge that the Tea Party and the GOP are “one and the same.” Not only that, they’re cooking up a plan to “get rid of” or privatize Social Security and Medicare, repeal the 17th Amendment, and abolish the departments of energy and education and the EPA.”
Here’s the ad in question:
As Neal Boortz points out, this is typical of Democrats in campaign mode. Since 1952 Democrats have been campaigning on the idea that Republicans will get rid of Social Security, and for 58 years Social Security has stayed put. It, along with the rest of the claims made in the video, is a tired old mantra.
Which isn’t to say that Social Security shouldn’t go on the chopping block. Shallow political scare tactics aside, we’ve got to do something as the program is an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
But I digress. What’s interesting to me is the mention of repealing the 17th amendment. Interesting not just because I doubt that many Americans could even tell you what the 17th amendment did, but also interesting because the last member of Congress to suggest repealing the 17th amendment was…Democrat Zell Miller who did so just before retiring.
So much for it being merely the domain of right-wing tea party extremists.
The 17th amendment, by the way, changed the manner in which our US Senators are chosen. Previously the Senators were appointed by the states. The 17th amendment made them popularly elected like the members of the House. The way our founders set things up, the House was intended to represent the populace. The Senate was to represent the various state governments. The Senate, put another way, was a counterbalance to the more direct democracy of the House. It was a check against the whims of the mob, essentially.
We never should have changed that, and the fallout from changing it is palpable even today. For instance, if the Senate was appointed by the states as opposed to popularly elected do you think the Congress would have ever been able to pass a health care bill that hugely expands already bankrupt government health care programs like Medicaid at the expense of states who, by and large, can’t afford it? Do you think that the steady erosion of localism, the transfer of political power from the state level to the national level, would have happened to the degree it has if the Senate were appointed by the states?
Of course not.
Liberals love the 17th amendment because it moved us away from the sort of distributed government our founders preferred to the centralized, all-powerful federal government they prefer. Undoing the 17th amendment is no radical notion. It would be the correction of a mistake, and a restoration of the republic to a form our founding fathers would approve of.
Tags: 17th amendment, democrats, neal boortz, peggy noonan, senate, Tea Parties
