Organized Crime

The popular election of U.S. Senators allows a small cabal of wealthy plutocrats to exert grossly disproportionate influence over government policy. This is because getting elected to the U.S. Senate requires the raising of millions of dollars for television advertising, campaign consultants, publicists, and the other elements of modern campaigning. Consequently, U.S. Senators have long been “in the pockets” of their major “campaign contributors,” some of whom may not even be American citizens. And the interests of these donors is not always the same as the best interests of the voting constituents in the home states of the senators.

It was not always that way. The original constitutional system called for the appointment of U.S. Senators by state legislatures. It wasn’t until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913 that senators were popularly elected.

Professor Ralph Rossum of Claremont McKenna College explained the rationale for the system of appointing senators in his book, Federalism, the Supreme Court, and the Seventeenth Amendment. The founding fathers intended that state legislatures would appoint senators and then instruct them on how to vote in Congress. This was to safeguard against the corruption of senators by special interests. “The ability of state legislatures to instruct senators was mentioned frequently during the Constitutitonal Convention and the state ratifying conventions and was always assumed to exist,” wrote Professor Rossum.

At the New York ratifying convention John Jay, one of the authors of The Federalist Papers, said that “The Senate is to be composed of men appointed by the state legislatures. . . . I presume they will also instruct them, that there will be a constant correspondence between the senators and the state executives.” At the Massachusetts ratifying convention Fisher Ames referred to U.S. senators as “ambassadors of the states.” James Madison wrote in Federalist #45 that because of this system of appointing senators the U.S. Senate “would be disinclined to invade the rights of the individual States, or the prerogatives of their governments.” In Federalist #62 Madison further wrote that the appointment system “gave to state governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government as must secure the authority of the former.” In other words, it was meant to enhance the ability of the citizens of the states to be the masters rather than the servants of their own central government.

When Kentucky and Virginia nullified the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, issued by the state legislatures, instructed the states’ U.S. senators to vote to repeal these acts. The appointment of senators often led to the resignation of senators whenever they reneged on their promises to remain faithful to the wishes of their state’s legislature. John Quincy Adams resigned from the U.S. Senate for supporting the Madison administration’s enforcement of the trade embargo, which the state’s legislature opposed. Senator David Stone of North Carolina resigned in 1814 after his state legislature disapproved of his collaboration with the New England Federalists on several legislative issues. Senator Peleg Sprague of Maine resigned in 1835 after opposing his state legislature’s instructions to oppose the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States.

When the U.S. Senate “censored” President Andrew Jackson for having vetoed the rechartering of the Bank, seven U.S. Senators resigned rather than carry out their state legislatures’ instructions to vote to have President Jackson’s censure expunged. One of them was Senator John Tyler of Virginia, who would become president of the United States in 1841.

The original system of state legislative appointment of U.S. senators did exactly what it was designed to do: limit the tyrannical proclivities of the central government. As Professor Todd Sywicki of George Mason University wrote in a 1997 issue of the Cleveland State Law Review, “the Senate played an active role in preserving the sovereignty and independent sphere of action of state governments” in the pre-Seventeenth Amendment era prior to 1913. “Rather than delegating lawmaking authority to Washington, state legislators insisted on keeping authority close to home. . . . As a result, the long-term size of the federal government remained fairly stable and relatively small during the pre-Seventeenth Amendment era.” This of course is also why there was a decades-long crusade to end the system of legislative appointment of senators and replace it with direct elections. The “god” of democracy provided a clever subterfuge for the advocates of unlimited powers in the hands of the central government.