Ditching the Seventeenth

The Overton Window is moving. I remember a while back when calls to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment, which provides for popular election of Senators, were rare, the sort of thing a provocateur — the late Jim Bennett was one — might throw out at a cocktail party. Like a lot of Jim Bennett’s ideas — he started the first private rocket company, the American Rocket Company, back in the 1980s — it may have been ahead of its time. But maybe its time is coming.

Just last week, Congressman Keith Self introduced a resolution to repeal the Seventeenth. And this time the idea doesn’t seem quite as crazy.

Background: When the Constitution was drafted, and for well over a century afterward, the Senate wasn’t popularly elected. The Constitution provided for the choice of Senators by state legislatures. One did not really campaign for a Senate seat, one lobbied. This was consistent with the Constitutional plan, in which the House of Representatives represented the people, while the Senate represented the states.

The Progressive movement didn’t much like this (a cynic might suggest that they thought it would be easier to demagogue the public than state legislatures made up of cynical politicians.) The 17th was also very much in keeping with the more democracy mood of the era. The franchise had been expanded from a minority of white men with property, to all white men, to all men, and was well on the way (just two amendments later!) to being extended to women.