Put this in the category of stuff that looks like I’m just trying to be provocative to get a rise out of y’all, but I thought I’d share my surprise at learning that the Tea Party has a controversial position that I share.
The New York Times says the idea should be “unthinkable:”
A modern appreciation of democracy — not to mention a clear-eyed appraisal of today’s dysfunctional state legislatures — should make the idea unthinkable. But many Tea Party members and their political candidates are thinking it anyway, convinced that returning to the pre-17th Amendment system would reduce the power of the federal government and enhance state rights.
… which I take as a challenge. Let’s think about it anyway.
So some Tea Partiers want to do away with popular election of Senators — an idea that is doomed to go nowhere, of course, because once you let the people elect an office, even if it’s an official they can’t name (walk down the street and ask everyone you meet to name the state agriculture commissioner, or the secretary of state, and then tell me they need to be popularly elected), that privilege will never be revoked. Try, and someone will demagogue you on it, and that’s the end of that.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. The Framers constructed a system of checks and balances that was based in part in the fact that each branch — or in this case, each branch of a branch — was elected via a different process. Politicians tend to dance with the one that brung ’em, and this ensured that each one was brung by someone else.
No, wait, that analogy doesn’t work, because ultimately the source of these elections was the people. Rather, each official was chosen by a different method, which was bound to make them look upon their constituency in a different way. The House of Representatives was always to be the People’s House, in that it was the one body most directly (and most often) responsive to the public whim of the moment. The president was supposed to be somewhat insulated from those same political winds by being chosen by the Electoral College — a method that required him to get wider support, as opposed to merely winning a few population centers.
Judges were to be nominated by the executive, with advice and consent from the Senate — which is about as much as you can insulate them from politics while still having their selection rooted in the public will over time.
And the Senate — well, the purpose of the Senate was to represent states. The House represented aggregations of individuals, and to keep the more populous states from running roughshod over the less crowded ones, each state got exactly two senators. And since the idea was that they represented states, of course they were chosen by the bodies that made decisions for the states as states — the legislators who make the state’s laws.
The balance of differently formed constituencies making their decisions through different processes was a thing of beauty. Not that all the decisions thus made were beautiful, but that’s the thing: The Framers expected human beings to be fallible, and that included the almighty People themselves. So you constitute different constituencies and play them off against each other. Checks and balances.
Of course, the NYT thinks it settles the matter when it appeals to everyone’s contempt for their state legislatures. Well, if you really think the legislatures would make worse decisions than the electorate at large, you haven’t really paid attention to some of the warts who get elected by the all-knowing People. Let’s give it a try; it couldn’t get worse.
Instead of what the Framers envisioned, now we have the representatives and senators chosen in the same way (OK, it’s statewide vs. district, which is something, but not as different as the old way), going after the same money sources to finance their campaigns, and consulting the same polls, their fingers ever in the wind to make sure they’re doing the popular thing at every moment. And no tough decisions get made.
No, it’s never going to happen because no one today is about to do the unpopular thing, and this would be very unpopular. (And hey, maybe if the Tea Party endorsed more unpopular, politically counterintuitive ideas such as this, we wouldn’t hear about the Tea Party any more, so I want to encourage them in this.) But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.
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