Whew…FINALLY…

Ms E – Unable to detect usual linkie on post. Suspecting lack of personal sharpitude, sought to round up usual suspects: ran around Senator Feingold’s website, Senate site for list of bills introduced, google search – to not avail.

Linkie?

Senator Feingold – – in deference to phred: Feinglindor, Good Warlock of the North – – has the item up on his website now – – but it’s indistinguishable from what Ms E Wheel put up here, i.e. nothing more in the way of detail.

If one does a brief google walk through the background of the fightin’ 17th, one notes that, in common with all constitutional amendments, it took some time to get through the process: the House, the Senate, the Prez, ratification by 2/3. Not ’so much time it’s both embarrassing & relevatory’, like with the ERA, mind you – but nonetheless measured in years, not months.

Indeed, I would argue that movement was actually better measured in terms of decades rather than years. The most visible part of the legislative action, during the period just before WWI, was the culmination of a longtime-held & widely [near universally] perceived need to address two big retrograde effects of constitutional infirmity:

[a] Over the course of the first 130 years of Us history, the individual states had developed very different taxation fiefdoms, which through the post Civil War & Industrial Revolution had proved to be largely if not completely irreconcilable, with many of the differences, and accommodations to them – and measures in protest against them- having created barriers, giving rise to crippling inefficiencies in interstate relations and national expression, particularly in the areas of commerce, personal mobility & the capacity of the various state governments & the federal government to enforce the rule of law, at all, leave aside with any semblance of equality.

[b] There was an urgent need to address empowering the federal government in the one, most meaningful way that had been neglected since the Civil War- national war endeavors having proven to to that point to be the only means by which the federal government could exercise a national mandate: by funding it, through ceding to it the power to raise monies through taxation during peacetime and in periods during which there was no national emergency or expansion project [It’s no accident that the two more often than not coincided.]

It may appear that I’ve mixed up the 17th with the 16th amendment, but in fact the two were seen [I think correctly as inextricably tied to each other, the 17th being seen at the time as a necessary means by which to ensure the efficacy of the 16th.

I’m not at all certain that ANY sort of constitutional amendment is possible now [Again, I cite the ERA by way of example.], leave aside one without the same kind of undeniable need with virtually universal support.

I also don’t see the need. Before the 17th the selection of a state’s senators was entirely within the control of the individual state legislature. Since the 17th the state legislature’s control is limited to replacement, such as through resignation like we’ve seen since November or death. The circumstances which put the control over selecting the successor to President-elect Obama in Illinois came about by the choice of the Illinois state legislature: that was who ceded the power to MacBlago – – and that is who can in the long run at least remove that power. It can choose to do so by various means: EG in the case of election followed by death or removal or resignation at any time up to a certain period before the expiry of the 6 year term by requiring deference to the same sort of popular election the 17th already mandates for original qualification, and thereafter by reserving onto its own membership the power to choose the “temporary” seat holder until the end of the term, and only reserving the power of succession to the state’s chief executive in defined ‘emergency’ situations, perhaps including a very brief period before the end of the term.

The rationale behind including in the 17th the idea of ceding succession selection power to the state chief executive is something of an historical anomaly or atavism, brought about by so many instances of lengthy, unresolved and sometimes never resolved disputes within particular state legislatures over who would be selected to take the seat. The reason I refer to that as an ‘anomaly’ [Doing so might strike some as strange, given the superficial proof from the situations in Illinois and to a lesser extent in New York State that the phenomenon is NOT anomalous – tho I could still point to Minnesota, as well as to the 2000 POTUS election, as showing that lengthy periods over which the ’selection’ remains unresolved are hardly an exclusive function of the power being reserved to state government actors], is that, again, the 17th was a child of the late horse-and-buggy, pony express days of transport and communication.

The main reason I would be reluctant to get strongly behind this initiative by Senator Feingold is the current costs, combined with it being not at all apparent that such costs will even cease to rise at a rate that exceeds what we’d all concede is runaway inflation, let alone reduce to some tolerable level. I recognize that the power associated with every individual seat in the US Senate is immense [Witness the power that fuckhead Bunning demonstrated in putting a hold on the means Congress set up to exercise oversight over Treasury Secretary Hanky Panky’s imperial gifting of the first half of the TARP funds.], but I don’t just measure the costs of popular election in terms of money, but in the larger sense of ‘costs’ to proper maintenance of the role of the popular ballot in the context of a constitutional democracy. I would argue that, inside a year – maybe even two – of replacing a national legislative seat holder via a popular election risks cheapening the sort of meaning we place on the electoral process, especially given the evidence of how the best-of-intentioned states like Mnnesota can find itself embroiled in a process that could prove to deprive the state of a seat in the Senate for a number of months.

I.m gonna goa all serious for a second:

I don’t agree with popular elections for Senators. under the original construct, Senators represent THE STATE, and Representitives represent THE PEOPLE

this created a triangular relationship betweed Fed, State, and the People, and allowed the State to protect the People from the Fed, and vise versa

when Senators began being choosen by direct election, this relationship was destroyed, and the State and the Fed were allowed to join against the People

restore the original relationship

give the State Legislature the right to choose THE STATE’S senators

we know return you to your original reality,, where we snark and snack on trolls an leave the real discussions to those unfortunate enough to have grown up …

My bet is, the bailout would suck more, not less.