Look at the county-by-county voting map of the country by party. What you observe is an ocean of red and little blue space here and there in the major cities in major population centers.
This pattern has changed very little for decades. Everyone knows this and yet there is very little understanding as to why this pattern persists and why blue so completely dominates red in election outcomes. You can drill down further and look, for example, at New York State from the recent governor race.
Forget everything you know about how American elections operate and imagine a system whereby the whole gains some form of representation in the U.S. Congress. You might imagine that one part of Congress would represent the popular vote and thus give population centers dominance. The other would represent the whole geography of each state and thus be dominated by broader interests of the whole people.
Such a system is called bicameral. It has two chambers with different forms of representation. Such a system traces back to the Roman republic and we see that today in parliamentary systems with a House of Commons and a House of Lords. The Framers admired such a system because of its proven record.
That’s why the U.S. Constitution institutionalized such a system. In fact, the U.S. Constitution opens with a firm embrace. I seriously doubt that anyone who conceived of this ever imagined that it would ever be disturbed.
Article I says: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”
The House “shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States.”
The Senate is different: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years.”
By imposing a longer term and having the legislatures choose the Senators (a House of Lords except within a republican system), the Founders hoped to give the states preeminence in the Congress. This way the cities and large population centers would not oppress everyone else. The states themselves would be strongly represented.
It was a careful and brilliant balance. Under it, the Senate today would be overwhelmingly red. No question about it. The House would likely tilt blue. They would check each other. And the states would be the dominate interest in U.S. politics. That’s why it used to be routine to refer to THESE United States.
In 1914, which came during a period known as the Progressive Era, a series of disastrous changes happened (the income tax and Fed among them). One of them was the 18th Amendment which actually banned the production and sale of alcoholic beverages. Unbelievably stupid! That ridiculous attempt was reversed in 1932 with the 21st Amendment: “The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.”
So there is precedent in U.S. history for leadership to observe that a previous generation had done something stupid. The 13th and 14th Amendments are also examples of wrongs being made right: the abolition of slavery and the guarantee of equal rights.
Let’s talk about the 17th Amendment. It reversed a major part of Article I of the Constitution. It reads: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years.” In other words, the original Constitution had the Senate “chosen by the Legislature thereof” whereas the new amendment replaced those words with “elected by the people.”
Boom: disaster ensued.
With this amendment, the bicameral structure of the Congress was destroyed. The House and Senate became the same except for cosmetics. Both are elected by the people. This radical disturbance massively upset the framers’ core design of the Congress. It took away the states’ major form of representation and ended the decentralized federalist structure.
In effect, the 17th Amendment put the major cities of the country in power over everywhere else. That’s why they have dominated ever since. The system has proven deeply oppressive. The Democrats have learned to manipulate this advantage. They campaign mostly in major cities where people robotically, mechanistically, and predictably vote for Democrats and the policies the party represents.
Now, thanks to insane COVID changes, which allowed every form of ballot manipulation, the dominance of the population centers over the rest of the country has arrived at the next level.
For the Republicans to compete, they have to spend vast resources canvassing the whole of the state and getting out every last vote and making sure they are counted. The Democrats only have to rally their urban voting blocs and be done with it. In some sense, it is a miracle that given this unfair advantage the Senate is competitive at all.
We saw how this worked yesterday in the Georgia runoff. The state is overwhelmingly red with the exception of Atlanta and Savannah. And yet these two cities swung the election to blue. To be sure, the Republicans stupidly ran a very weak candidate based on name recognition and popular fame (another brainy idea of a former president) but this slight disadvantage turned out to be devastating because the voting system favors large population centers over everyone else.
This makes zero sense. It effectively disenfranchises whole states and imposes a wicked form of urban dominance. It was not supposed to work this way. The Georgia state legislature is overwhelmingly red for a reason: it is drawn from the whole state. Had the original Constitution prevailed, the state legislature would have easily tapped a competent and articulate leader from among them to become the Senator for the whole of the state.
That experience would have been repeated all over the country and the Senate would likely be two-thirds or three-quarters red, and its main interest would be in defending the rights of the states.
With the 17th Amendment, the states lose any effective representation in Congress, which accounts for why since 1914, government at the center has grown ever more powerful and rich, while the states and the broad population of people living in them face a boot on the neck and have for a full century.
This system needs to be ended now because it betrays the Framers, the bicameral system, and massively distorts the legislative process. It spells the end of states rights. Why did it happen? Because the Progressives were extremely stupid people. They sought to end vote buying at the state level through misconceived populism that ended up creating a system that became more corrupt than ever.
Nothing I have written in this column is unknown or ever controversial. It’s not a radical observation merely to restore the original Constitutional structure. Why don’t more people talk about it? Why is this subject so neglected? Because too many elites have benefited from the 17th Amendment. Once they obtained power by destroying the bicameral structure of the Congress, they didn’t want to go back.
Should the Republicans ever by some work of magic obtain two-thirds control of the Senate, it should immediately propose and pass a 28th Amendment: “The 17th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.”
That one change would do more to restore the U.S. Constitution than any other change. It would also give new life to the mighty 10th Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Probably you think my suggestion here is improbable. Maybe, but we live in emergency times. The United States is sinking due to imperial overreach, debt, and hegemonic control by the elites over the states and the people. It must be stopped, if we care at all about the future. At the very least, we need to start talking about this subject. The great mistake of 1914 must be reversed to save this country.
