Direct Election Of Senators: A Hidden Federalization

In this post from this past June, I enumerated 10 things I believe need to be fixed in the Constitution.

Since then, I've decided there should be an additional item regarding deficits and balanced budgets. But that's for another post.

Today, I want to comment on an aspect of my ninth item which I had heretofore not realized.

In the June post, I wrote,

"9. Novice politicians gaining entry to the Senate due to the amendment requiring direct election of this body intended to be more deliberative and experienced than the House."

All I really focused on, thanks to Wonderboy's misguided election last November, was making sure that Senators have more qualifications than just age and citizenship.

Watching Mary Landrieu's comic performance during the voting to bring the Senate health care bill to the floor gave me another insight.

One unintended consequence of the direct election of Senators was the removal of an important check in the Constitutional system. It wasn't between the branches, but between the federal government and the states.

I've never seen this expressed anywhere else, so I thought I'd offer some observations.

Prior to the amendment providing for the direct election of Senators, as I noted in this post from March, 2008, quoting the Senate's own website,

"Just reflecting on the original mechanism for Senate election, it's easy to see how differently Senators prior to 1913 would behave, as opposed to modern Senators. Senators chosen by their state's political party leaders would almost of necessity be committed to the welfare of their state over their own career. Because they didn't really 'run' for the office, fund-raising, politicking as it is currently understood, and the appeal to voters' baser motivations probably didn't occur as they do today.

I can imagine Senators of that day truly behaving as the Constitution's architects intended, worrying less about their seat than carefully addressing major issues to the benefit of the country and their state."

Indirectly-elected Senators were an intentional Constitutional check on federal power. State-level political parties would ensure that Senators didn't expect lifetime careers. Rather, they were beholden to the state party, which, by necessity, had to do a good job for the state's voters, or lose its control over the legislatures.

This carefully-calibrated bias for states rights in the Senate was torn away with the passage of the 17th amendment.

After some reflection, I think it's this aspect of the direct election of Senators that has been most damaging. Representatives are subject to recall every two years. Senators, by contrast, manage to go six years between elections. Without the pre-selection by their own parties, I believe they have become disconnected from their states, to the detriment of the nation.

No longer answering to their own parties, Senators today seem to be in business mostly for themselves. Mary Landrieu's deal with Harry Reid to get a $300M dispensation for Louisiana in the health care bill does, in one sense, reflect her working for her state's benefit. But, in a larger sense, she really did damage to the nation. With no need to explain the larger benefits of the bill to her state-level Democratic party, Landrieu basically bought her seat forward with that $300M.

If she were being nominated by her party, she probably wouldn't have been quite so mercenary with everyone's money.

I believe that indirectly-elected Senators had to assure their parties back in the home state that they were working for both the country's and the state's good. If the state party saw voters leaning one way on an issue, they could and probably did make clear to the Senator how s/he should vote, if s/he were to remain in the seat.

Not so anymore. Now, it's mostly a popularity contest, with Senators often feeling themselves above the state party apparatus, once elected.

Issues like tax levels and fiscal rectitude don't seem to matter to the Senate anymore. They avoid taking responsibility for excessive spending, buying votes with it.

But the Senators of old didn't need to do that, because their voters were the state party politicians in the legislatures.

It seems to me that this unintended consequence has had seriously bad long term consequences for our nation. A key states' rights linkage, the indirect election of Senators, was removed, implicitly handing much more power to the federal government, and insulating Senators from any real pressure from their own states' parties.