On February 24, the Utah Senate passed SJR 2, which asks Congress to pass a proposed constitutional amendment to repeal the 17th Amendment. The 17th Amendment, which went into effect in 1913, provides that voters choose U.S. Senators. Utah SJR 2 asks that the state legislature regain the power to choose U.S. Senators.
The vote was 20-6, with three Senators not voting. All Democrats voted “No.” All Republicans voted “Yes”, except that Republican Senator Brian Shiozawa voted “No”. The three Senators who didn’t vote are Republicans: Curtis Bramble, Lyle Hillyard, and Stephen Urquhart.
Supporters of this idea appear ignorant that, before the 17th amendment, state legislatures frequently deadlocked on choice of a U.S. Senator, so that a state sometimes went unrepresented for at least one of its U.S. Senate seats up to a year. Also, supporters of SJR 2 appear not to know that before the 17th amendment, prospective U.S. Senators were frequently found to have bribed state legislators. Thanks to Ken Bush for the news.
States rarely deadlocked after Congress provided a mechanism that would tend to resolve ties.
Congress has time and manner authority over both House and Senate elections. The reason Congress does not have place authority, is because that would have, prior to the 17th Amendment, meant that Congress could dictate the meeting places of state legislatures.
Congress dictated a procedure where if the two chambers could not agree on a senator, then a joint vote be held. The only cases of deadlocks after that were when there were three factions.
Since the US senators were seen as representing the state government – the only harm of a vacancy would be to a state legislature that failed to choose a senator.
Legislative election of senators did have the possibility of corrupting legislative elections. For example, the Lincoln-Douglas debates were in effect to encourage voters to elect supporters to the state legislature, who would then elect Lincoln or Douglas.
The FEC could regulate bribes of state legislators in the election of US Senators.
Barack Obama as a senator from Illinois bragged on the fact that he had not communicated with governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich for the past several years.
Can you imagine if ambassador to the United Nations were popularly elected, and could pursue a policy that was opposite of that by the administration in Washington?
If they are not representing the state government in a federal republic, then there is no reason to maintain the guarantee of two senators per state.
Perhaps a compromise would be for legislators to nominate the senatorial candidates (this would not require a repeal of the 17th Amendment), or that there be popular nomination of prospective senators, with the legislature choosing among those nominated (this would require a new amendment).
Or perhaps the number of senators per state could be increased from two to three, with senators restricted to serving 6 years out of any 10-year period.
Go Utah!
I trust the founders on this. The haven’t been wrong yet.
The founders were certainly wrong when they wrote the original Constitution, concerning the electoral college. They said the person who came in 2nd in the electoral college should be vice-president. That resulted in a near-disaster in the 1800 election, when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied for first place, and the US House took weeks to choose Jefferson. Burr could easily have become president and that would not have been good at all. As a result of the mess, in 1804 the 12th amendment was passed.
But without Burr’s campaign to win New York’s electoral votes, he and Jefferson would have lost to John Adams and Charles Cotesworth Pinkney — despite the bonus of Southern electoral votes based on counting slaves under the three-fifths clause. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1800
Also, read chapters 4-5 of _Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power_ by Garry Wills. (Heck, read the whole book!)