The 17th Amendment was supposed to solve a particular problem — the political establishment was thought to be exercising too much control over the selection of senators, making the process too susceptible to corruption. The idea was to fix that by taking control out of the hands of that establishment, and putting it directly into the hands of voters.
No, seriously. People apparently thought that would address the problem.
But as is so often the case in politics, the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. Without solving the the old problem, it created a new, and much worse, problem — one that has recently metastasized from the Senate to the House.
The original idea behind the Senate was this: The House, with a shorter election cycle, and direct elections, could be expected to jump on whatever populist bandwagon happened to be passing by at the moment. Legislation coming out of the House could therefore be expected to look for sweeping, half-baked, national solutions to problems that should be handled federally, i.e., by individual states. The Senate’s job was basically to say: No, the states can handle that.
How do you set something like that up? While allowing people to elect members of the House directly, you leave it to the state legislatures to appoint members of the Senate. So each senator understands that his job is to look after the interests of his own state. And he’s kept on a short leash.
You know those 9th and 10th Amendments in the Bill of Rights? The ones no one pays any attention to? This was supposed to be the enforcement mechanism for those. But the 17th Amendment effectively repealed the 9th and 10th Amendments.
With direct election of senators, the Senate became essentially a second House, with longer terms and fewer members, but susceptible to the same preference for national solutions to federal problems.
The predictable result is that people have stopped seeing senators as representing their states. They see senators as representing everyone. Instead of being a central feature of the Senate, geography is now largely seen as accidental. And so instead of focusing on your own state’s elections, it’s often more practical to try to influence Senate elections in other states.
How else do you get people like Robert Kennedy or Hillary Clinton getting elected to the Senate from New York? Or Al Franken getting elected to the Senate from Minnesota? Or Mitt Romney running for the Senate in Utah?
And so, predictably, not a week goes by without my getting at least one solicitation to contribute to the campaign of someone running for the US Senate in another state. I expect the pace to pick up as we get closer to November.
I’m used to that. What worries me, though, is that this is now becoming a feature of House races as well.
Exhibit A is Maura Sullivan, who recently moved from Illinois to New Hampshire with the apparent goal of turning New Hampshire’s 1st congressional district into Illinois’s 19th district. Reportedly, more than 95% of her financial support has come from people outside New Hampshire. I would be amazed to learn that this kind of thing isn’t happening in House races in other states as well.
We keep saying that we don’t want so much interference from Washington, right? But we’re just getting what we asked for, when we ratified the 17th Amendment. This, as Malcolm X might say, is just the chickens coming home to roost.
The people we send to Washington need to represent the needs of New Hampshire, not the needs of people in other states. And first among those needs is for Washington to leave us alone to solve our own problems, in our own ways — to treat us more like a state, and less like a colony.
As state senate candidate Carla Gericke likes to say: Let’s make America states again! She’s right. Repealing the 17th Amendment would be a good step in that direction.
But our experience with the 17th Amendment suggests that we should probably go a step further as well, and leave it to state legislatures to appoint both representatives and senators to Congress. That would restore the character of that institution, from a national legislature back to a federal one, which is something we need more with each passing year — a government that exists to help states cooperate in spite of their differences, not to bludgeon them into uniformity.
The benefits would be immediate, and striking. No more carpetbagging. No more out-of-state money (or out-of-state voters) interfering with what should be an exclusively in-state process. No more election campaigns that ignore issues while focusing on personalities. And while it wouldn’t drain The Swamp entirely, it would at least shake things up considerably, because campaign contributions, which are the principal tool of lobbyists, can’t be used to bribe representatives and senators who don’t campaign.
Do we want to to start dialing back the colonization of the states, and make it next to impossible for lobbyists to buy seats in Congress, all at the same time? It’s within our reach. And all we’d have to give up is the illusion that politics can ever be free of some kind of corruption. Which is kind of like outgrowing Santa Claus.
