Tea Partiers & 17th Amendment

Recently, David Broder (Washington Post, 5/20/10), noted the Tea Party's outcry against the 17th Amendment. That's the amendent to the U.S. Constitution that changed the way U.S. senators are selected in our country. People who vociferously argue that the 17th Amendment was just another way of rejecting the principles of our founding are well advised to look to the origins of the 17th amendment.

Our Founding Fathers debated quite vigorously over several key issues - for instance, how large should the central (federal) government be, how much independence should states have, and how direct should the country's democracy be. The tension is captured by the Federalist Papers (written by John Jay, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton), and various papers written by Antifederalists (Patrick Henry, Robert Yates, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Bryan, and an array of others - often under pennames).

One of the key issues at the time was how much political influence should the ordinary citizen have? (By the way, at the founding, voting citizens were white males who owned a certain amount of property.) The Federalists feared the "passions" of the masses and believed that elites were more suited to republic virtue. Thus it was the duty of the elite to make decisions for the ordinary citizen and to guide the new republic. Hamilton, in fact, proposed making the presidential office hereditary - something Patrick Henry described as "squinting toward monarchy." The Antifederalists decried the elite-popular split and believed the ordinary citizen could learn republican virtue.

The original Constitution and the Bill of Rights represent many compromises on these issues. While members of the U.S. House of Representatives were directly elected (2 year terms), U.S. senators (seen as a more august body with 6 year terms , were elected by each state's legislature - not by each voter. The 17th Amendment (1913) did away with that process, and since then U.S. Senators are directly elected by voters.

The selection of the president was also removed from direct democratic control. We still have the Electoral College.