Adopted in 1913, the 17th Amendment to the Constitution is a small box packing big news. Each state, it says, gets two senators “elected by the people thereof” to work for it in Washington.
While states had for years held de facto direct elections for senators, the 17th Amendment made it law, giving voters the right to choose who they want in the U.S. Senate.
U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., and some of his fellow tea party candidates now frivolously say they want it gone.
In July, at an “America Speaking Out” event in downtown Athens, Broun told a handful of attendees that “Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson started this process of socializing America. And they did it with ... the 17th Amendment that allows the direct election of U.S. senators ... I’d like to see the 16th Amendment and the 17th Amendment to be repealed, finally.”
According to Broun, it’s the non-special-interest, non-big-government thing to do for state legislatures, not voters, to choose senators. Broun isn’t alone on this. Also in this year’s repeal-it class are Ken Buck, former aide to then-U.S. Rep. Dick Cheney and a former U.S. attorney, now the Republican Senate pick in Colorado; and Joe Miller, a Yale Law School graduate and Republican Senate pick in Alaska.
What’s the point? Why has this rather usual-sounding part of the Constitution come up as a national campaign issue? And since tea partiers talk so much about their love of the Constitution, why would they want to “recover” it in victory only so they can snap off one of its limbs?
Jump back a few years, to 2004, when another Georgian was hollering for the 17th Amendment’s repeal and introduced a Senate resolution to do so: then-U.S. Sen. Zell Miller. “Direct elections of senators,” the former Georgia governor said on the chamber floor, “allowed Washington’s special interests to call the shots.”
“The individuals are not so much at fault,” Miller said, “as the rotten and decaying foundation of what is no longer a republic. It is the system that stinks.”
For his part, the Georgia Democrat argued that senators, in thrall to special interests, wouldn’t be so enthralled if legislatures appointed them. Federal-level lobbyists, the thinking goes, take senators’ focus away from state’s needs, and that this wouldn’t happen if senators answered foremost to state legislatures.
Miller’s point could be a fair one, of course, if local lobbyists weren’t as thick on the ground in state capitols advocating for clients as they are in Washington. But they are. (Drop by the Gold Dome sometime, if you’re skeptical.)
Another argument is that ditching the 17th Amendment and going back to the original process of state legislatures appointing senators would boost state power, and weaken the federal power embodied in the U.S. Senate.
But if the 17th Amendment were gone, senators wouldn’t lose any power. Voters would. Direct election obviously encourages senators to heed state matters — and if they don’t, thanks to the 17th Amendment, we’ve got the right to vote them out.
It’s an awkward business, if you’re a populist out asking voters to elect you, so that those voters can have less of a say about who gets elected the next time. It’s also hogwash.
If we buy Broun’s line, then we let the Constitution — that lawfully amended and defended covenant, to which the tea party claims such devotion — become a campaign prop for him and his tea party peers.
Changing the nation’s founding document requires a very good reason. Broun and those of like mind don’t have one.
Wells C. Bennett, an Atlanta native, is a lawyer in Washington, D.C. Jonathan G. Williams of Atlanta is a freelance writer.
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