Comment by dsfyu404ed
3 years ago
The senate was never meant to represent people. It was meant to represent the interested of the states as sovereign entities. The house was supposed to be the populist dumpster fire.
But then some geniuses decided that we should direct elect both and have two dumpster fires.
>But then some geniuses decided that we should direct elect both and have two dumpster fires.
this was done because the election process via the state assemblies was so corrupt that Americans regularly made fun of the Senate for this fact.
Sure, but so was everything else the states did at the time and they did eventually clean up their act. It's hard to say whether direct electing the senate was good or bad because it's not like there's a control country we can compare to. It certainly gave the states as entities less influence which is probably not great.
It did no such thing. It gave state legislatures less influence in Federal governance.
If you’re a big believer in the mythological principles of US government, the idea of people electing representatives shouldn’t be seen as a diminishing of the state. State power is endowed by the creator to the people.
Legislatures aren’t states. The governor is the head of state executing the laws of the people as expressed by the legislature.
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There’s a complex relationship here; the change diminished all states greatly, in favor of passing power to their citizens, but it also empowered the citizens of the big empty states in a way that the citizens of the small urban states were already empowered.
It occurs to me after typing this that when you said “as entities” you were probably alluding to this dichotomy.
I like the idea of moving back to having the Senate controlled by the States, I think it would help clean up some of the mess.
I disagree on the point that the states have cleaned up their act, what has happened is that the Federal government has taken on more power and responsibility from the States, for better and worse.
Meanwhile, people have become more disconnected from their state politics and only focus on the federal. Up to the point of blaming the federal government for not acting when it is the state's responsibility.
I did not really like how fast and loose with history you were, so I will just say that they did not clean up their act on their own, but were forced to. Many things have been forced on the states judicially, brown v board of education, baker v Carr/wesberry v sanders/reynolds v sims all forced more equitable voting schemes(ie, handling gerrymandering) etc are some easy examples I could think of for how your idea that the states figured themselves out is a misconception.
You could compare it to the UK's House of Lords, where seats are (unbelievably to me) hereditary - passed down from toffs to their children.
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Lol. That was done to placate the slave owners.
Just like modern reactionary politics isn’t good for people or popular, the biggest fear of slave owners was that free whites would figure out that slaves gutted the value of their labors.
It doesn’t take a “genius” to figure out that having state legislatures select federal legislators is foolish. Anyone suggesting that the US Senate as constituted for the last century is a populist institution may require institutional help of another kind.
While I agree that oligarchy has been the order of the day for some time, perhaps always, it is not self evident that having hierarchical elections is somehow worse than direct votes for people we see talk briefly on TV. I would actually prefer that I always get to choose between people I actually know face to face, that in turn select diminishing numbers of people. When we vote for sound bites it is simply a matter of who can comvince us they believe our own hastily formed opinions predicated on subpar government, economics, and history education combined with a complete lack of relevant work experience are in fact correct. If I select between my neighbors, it would be based on my perception of their character, and the ability to spot both expertise and bs.
> Lol. That was done to placate the slave owners.
The 17th amendment was passed ~50yr after the civil war, a point in time when the overwhelming majority of the electorate had no memory of overt slavery and the people who did or who's parents did were even less influential than before due to immigration waves and industrialization (which concentrated population money and power in the northeast and Midwest generally speaking). Please f right off with your revisionist history.
>Anyone suggesting that the US Senate as constituted for the last century is a populist institution may require institutional help of another kind.
This is rich coming from the guy that just said an amendment passed in the 1900s was done to placate slave owners.
Regardless of the intent of the amendment, only a complete fool would claim that making appointed positions directly elected doesn't make the body formed by those positions more subject to populist sentiments than it previously was.
I'm not entirely sold on the idea that direct electing the senate is a bad thing but it doesn't take a genius to look at the situation before and after and see that there are pros and cons to both. Like you can literally pick up a history book and look at the influences the senate was beholden to and strongly pushed around by before and after the change.
Read more carefully. The constitutional mandate for state legislators to select senators was a compromise to placate slave owners.
Electing Senators directly took a long time to move forward because constitutional amendments are hard. Senatorial elections are statewide events, they are the only federal elected officials elected by the people of a state free of gerrymandering.
>>some geniuses A super majority of both the house and senate with 3/4 of all state legislatures in accordance with the intention of the original founders that people update things as the times change?
That's an interesting take, to call democracy a dumpster fire. Some people I suppose would have rather kept their parties with tea.