{"id":3395,"date":"2010-01-25T19:18:43","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T00:18:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=3395"},"modified":"2010-01-25T23:04:05","modified_gmt":"2010-01-26T04:04:05","slug":"reconsidering-the-peoples-seat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/3395\/reconsidering-the-peoples-seat\/","title":{"rendered":"Reconsidering “The People’s Seat”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the wake of Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown\u2019s upset victory, it looks like there might be slogan for other Republican senatorial candidates to ride to victory.\u00a0 Brown got the nation\u2019s attention when he reminded David Gergen that the seat he was running for didn\u2019t belong to the Kennedy family or the Democratic Party.\u00a0 It is \u201cthe people\u2019s seat\u201d.\u00a0 Now the Republican frontrunner to take President Obama\u2019s old senate seat is saying the same thing in Illinois<\/a>.\u00a0 That kind of populist shout-out certainly energizes the voters and activists disdainful of machine politics.\u00a0 But it also serves as a reminder of how different U.S. Senate elections have become since the Founding Fathers framed them.<\/p>\n

Originally, state legislatures elected United States Senators.\u00a0 The idea was to give the states themselves a voice in the national government.\u00a0 The effect was to make a state\u2019s U.S. Senator similar to a prime minister because a vote for a state legislator was (indirectly) a vote for a U.S. Senate candidate.\u00a0 (Incidentally, John F. Kennedy\u2019s \u201cProfiles in Courage\u201d has a delightful chapter about one such race featuring Missouri\u2019s incomparable Thomas Benton.)\u00a0 Of course, the Seventeenth Amendment changed all that when it made senators directly elected by a state\u2019s voting public.\u00a0 Had the original constitutional structure been retained, Scott Brown would likely not be Massachusetts\u2019 new senator because the state\u2019s legislature is dominated by Democrats.\u00a0 On the other hand, if it were still in effect, would it be more or less likely to have senators who thought of themselves as mini-presidents?\u00a0 If less, it seems likely that representatives of one government to another would be much more likely to question the expansion of the federal at the expense of the states.<\/p>\n

Maybe then we wouldn\u2019t need to worry so much about senators getting captured by the trappings of office.\u00a0 Their state legislature would be quick to pry them out if ever they forgot for whom they worked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the wake of Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown\u2019s upset victory, it looks like there might be slogan for other Republican senatorial candidates to ride to victory.\u00a0 Brown got the nation\u2019s attention when he reminded David Gergen that the seat he was running for didn\u2019t belong to the Kennedy family or the Democratic Party.\u00a0 It is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[778,725,777],"class_list":["post-3395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-profiles-in-courage","tag-scott-brown","tag-seventeenth-amendment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3395"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3402,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3395\/revisions\/3402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}