by Jeffry R Fisher

Created on: December 15, 2009   Last Updated: December 17, 2009

The deceptively innocuous 17th amendment took the US Senate away from state legislatures and gave it to the electorate. We're told that direct elections are democratic, and democracy is good, so the amendment must be good. However...

There's more to good government than injecting democracy. It also depends on those oft-mentioned but rarely understood "checks and balances". As a formal, powerful connection between state and federal levels of government, the state-appointed Senate offered a unique and especially vital check. The 17th amendment needlessly destroyed it, and we need it back. Let's repeal the 17th amendment.

"Check and Balance":

School taught that the purpose of the Senate was to empower small states against large ones. That was the reason for the Senate's 2-per-state representation, but that's not what was amended. Instead, the amendment eliminated appointment-by-state. Appointment did not balance large states versus small - it balanced all states versus Washington DC.

The founding fathers wanted that balance from the Senate so that Congress could represent both individual and state sovereignty. We might not even have two chambers in Congress except to serve those two cross purposes simultaneously.

When states appointed senators, senators answered to their states. Regardless of any state's temporary ideological leaning, every senator had some bias toward leaving decisions to state government whenever his legislature wanted to work out its own solutions (or already had).

A systematic bias toward decentralization has several salutary effects. At the federal level, less power means less tyranny risk and corruption attraction. Sadly, since the 17th amendment, our purely populist Congress has reduced states to mere vassals of Washington DC. Indeed, many citizens now wonder why we even have states anymore.

At the state level, decentralization allows diversity as the several states adopt various policies. Decentralization also fragments power, reducing the scope of tyranny when and where tyranny does crop up at that level.

Reduced scope not only offers a chance to confront oppression one state at a time, but it also reduces the cost of moving away from a government that one feels is unpleasant.

Combined with diversity, which offers a variety of destinations to which one may move, decentralization may actually enable us to please almost all of the people all of the time.

The Value of Democracy:

Democracy itself is merely a tool that can be used as easily

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