The Continual Campaign Problem
Article One, Section Three, of the US Constitution says: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of Two Senators from each State, chosen by the legislatures thereof, for six Years…..” In 1912 The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was proposed and it was ratified in 1913. It says: “The Senate…. shall be composed of two Senators from each state, elected by the people thereof, for six years…” In reading some of the history behind this dramatic change in the US Constitution one sees the words ‘bribery, corruption and accusations of suspicious voting and vote counting.’ It sounds no different than today. The reason is simple: political power is a valuable commodity.
Money and power are almost interchangeable and the desire for them both is one of the reasons we have a Constitution which, once upon a time, placed restrictions on government. More accurately it was supposed to place restrictions on the people in government. It was to limit the abuses they could heap upon the people.
Toward that end a bicameral legislature was designed, where one house was elected in two-year term by direct vote of the people. The other, supposedly a more deliberative body, would be composed of members chosen by the state legislatures for six-year terms. If you can, just imagine how Jim Black would have played with that little bit of power. Oh, that’s right, Jim found himself in prison for his shenanigans. How about Clodfelter? A big improvement on the political angle, I’m sure.
And this is the point and was the point. Senate seats were choice morsels and the state legislatures, being full of politicians, could not but play politics of every sort with them. And so, in order to cure that problem, we went to direct election. The question is: what have we improved? It seems nothing and that we have actually regressed.
Direct election requires those running for office to convince the voters to select them and this is done in a number of ways. First is joining a political party. The second is advertising. All others are part of the second, which includes endorsements, money raising, media relations etc. How much money can be raised is critical. And how much money raised is dependent upon how the money-giving establishment sees the candidate as someone who will give them what they want.
So the game is not much different than when Senators were chosen by the legislators. The difference is in the group that the candidates might be beholding to. Instead of the state legislatures, they are beholding to the monied interests. While not much different, being beholding to the state legislatures would make the Senators more concerned about issues the legislatures are concerned about, which would be generally more inline with other state issues. Further, we wouldn’t have a Senator Elizabeth Dole in NC or a Senator Hillary Clinton in New York. We would have local representatives.
As an often expressed concern is limiting donations to the candidates, nothing could do more than a repeal of the 17th Amendment. Nothing would do more for the people than limiting the need for large contributions and the continual campaigning for money.
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