REPEAL THE SEVENTEENTH AMENDMENT

REPEAL THE SEVENTEENTH AMENDMENT

Very few Americans realize this (quiz your children!), but we didn't always vote for our U.S. senators.

Under our Constitution as originally ratified, senators were appointed by the state legislatures. The idea was that the members of the House of Representatives would represent the people of the United States, and the senators would represent the interests of the state governments.

In 1913 the Seventeenth Amendment changed all that. From that point on, senators were elected by the people.

Things have been pretty much going downhill ever since.

The principal problem with the Seventeenth Amendment is that it leaves the fifty states with no official representation in Washington. If the nation of Angola has some sort of a beef with our national government, it has an official representative--the ambassador from Angola--to meet with our State Department officials and smooth things over. If the state of Arkansas has a problem with Washington -- a huge unfunded mandate, for instance--there's no "Ambassador from Arkansas" to make the point. The Arkansas senators are elected by the people, as are the members of the House; the state government has no specific representative to take up its case.

Our Founding Fathers clearly felt that most governance should be at the local level. Today, we've failed at that goal. With no official representation inside the Beltway, the state governments have no real ability to help restrain the flow of government power from the local to the national level.

The repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment would help correct this imbalance, vastly strengthening the state governments' hand in Washington. In that sense power would begin to shift from the federal level to the state level, bringing us closer to the system of semi-sovereign states that was envisioned by our founders.

Before he left public office, Senator Zell Miller of Georgia actually introduced a resolution calling for a Constitutional amendment repealing the Seventeenth. Smart man.