Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 21, 1994 TAG: 9409270010
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATTHEW J. FRANCK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
J. Marshall Coleman, who seems to have changed his views on the most grave moral issue of the age - abortion - about as often as Imelda Marcos changed shoes.
Oliver North, who only escaped criminal punishment (on appeal) through the clever stratagem of having previously confessed to being a criminal under a congressional grant of immunity (and this species of cleverness appears to be his chief qualification to join the other scoundrels on Capitol Hill).
Charles Robb, the distinctively undistinguished incumbent, who once had a bit of trouble resisting lovely blondes, but has no trouble turning intellectual somersaults about just how little resistance is too little and how much is enough.
L. Douglas Wilder, the near-messianic megalomaniac who is determined to be more than the mere footnote in history books he deserves to be.
A pox on them all! What is an unfortunate voter to do? How about this: Give up the right to vote for United States senators.
For the majority of our nation's history since the adoption of the Constitution (63 Senate election cycles out of 104, counting this year), the citizens of the states did not directly vote for their senators. Article I, section 3 of the Constitution provided that the state legislatures select U.S. senators, and this they did until 1914, the first election in which the 17th amendment, ratified the previous year, took effect and placed the power to elect senators directly in the hands of the people in statewide elections.
The framers of the Constitution did not have undemocratic reasons for placing state legislators between the people and the Senate. They had principled reasons, fully consistent with their vision of creating a national democracy that was also a partly federal one. The indirect-election scheme was no less and no more undemocratic than the decision to give each state two senators regardless of population. Both provisions reflected a purpose to embody the interests of states - of states as distinct, self-governing political communities, and not just of geographically convenient population groupings - in one half of the national legislature.
If the state, each as an entity that is more than merely the sum of its people, are the "constituents" of the Senate, then it is fitting that the size of the state should not matter. And equally fitting that the governing legislature of the state, elected to deliberate about the interests of that community, should choose who will represent those interests in the Congress.
The House of Representatives, by contrast, was to represent the more or less accidental accumulations of individual citizens in groups of roughly equal size (here geographical districts did quickly prove convenient), and to represent their popularly registered views and interests directly.
Having state legislatures choose senators, according to Virginia's James Madison, actually had a "double advantage": first, the one already noted, "of giving to the State governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government as must secure the authority of the former"; and second, of "favoring a select appointment."
To put it in blunt language that offends the modern populist sensibility, Madison and his fellow framers believed that state legislatures would choose better senators than would the people in a popular election.
Were the framers right?
It would take a good deal of argument to prove that there were fewer scalawags in the Senate of old than in the Senate of today. It would take less argument to show that there used to be more statesmen.
Where is Virginia's Richard Henry Lee, James Monroe or John Tyler in the Senate today? Or, from other states, a Henry Clay, Daniel Webster or Henry Cabot Lodge?
Could such men have gained their seats in the era of popular statewide elections? Possibly.
Were senators chosen by legislatures always on the basis of the best on merit-based criteria? Not necessarily; partisan corruption sometimes won the day.
But our parties today, weaker than they used to be and operating very differently, are hardly repositories of virtue and wisdom.
The essential difference is that in the old system the balance was tilted, however imperfectly, toward merit and away from mere popularity, toward deliberation and away from pandering, toward high-minded debate and away from grandstanding.
Those negative qualities have always been the hallmark of Congress' other chamber, a price paid there for the more direct transmission of the people's will. But in the democratic republic the framers designed, it was the Senate more than any other institution that made America a republic and not merely a democracy - with a Congress that could coolly and rationally debate the nation's interests in one chamber while heatedly, excitedly voicing the people's passionate desires in the other.
Only those who see no distinction at any time between the people's desires and their interests will fail to see the value of such a legislative division of labor. The difference did not always work out as planned, but it did so then more than it does now.
As our system evolved from the founding, that more "democracy" and less "republicanism" would creep into the system informally was nearly inevitable. Beginning as early as the highly visible 1858 Illinois contest between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, the choice of a senator became a crucial campaign issue in many state legislative elections. By the early l900s, some states had even (wrongly) obliged their legislatures to choose the winner of a popular referendum, effectively reversing the intentions of the framers .
But the real body-blow inflicted against the high quality of the Senate came in 1913 when "Progressives," the "left-wing radicals" of their day, won passage of the 17th amendment. They aimed at a worthy target when complaining of party hacks' being sent to the Senate. But they were at best careless of, and at worst hostile to, federalism - and shortsighted enough to dismiss the valuable distinction between the people's passions and the people's interests.
What they overlooked was that "democratizing" the selection of senators would simultaneously imprison and liberate that class of politicians. They have been imprisoned in the pandering, groveling cycle of electoral politics in a mass democracy. And they have been liberated from the system that once bound them to pay attention to the proper limits of national governing authority, and to defend federalism and the robust autonomy of the state governments that sent them to the Senate.
The rise of "big government" in Washington, anathema to both left and right in different ways, is not coincidentally related to both these effects of the choice made in 1913.
It's time for true conservatives - by that I mean those who would conserve what's left and restore what's lost of the framers' Constitution - to join in calling for the repeal of the 17th amendment.
Not only might we see better senators chosen in the future than any possible choice Virginia can make this year. But such a willing sacrifice of direct voter participation also could be the smartest move Americans have ever made in combating the gargantuan and growing power of the national government, and restoring some of the lost vigor of the American states.
Does it seem nutty to "turn the clock back" against a step that was so "obviously" progress? Maybe. But Americans have seen the rightness of correcting very old errors before.
Matthew J. Franck is assistant professor of political science at Radford University, and 1993-95 Salvatori Fellow with The Heritage Foundation.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB