The abominable Seventeenth

I have written before that the Seventeenth Amendment to the US Constitution should be repealed. Now, here is George F Will with the same argument.

As Will points out, people throw around the "separation of power" and "checks and balances" arguments in discussing the design of our Federal government, but they skip over the fact that the original design included a separation of power within the Congress, with one house elected by the people and one house elected by the state governments (and the President elected by a third body, the Electoral College). Since the Seventeenth Amendment, power has been concentrated in the hands of the people, and the state governments have lost all representation.

It was this change in the fundamental nature of our federal system that resulted in the rampant and ongoing usurpation of the powers of state governments by the federal government -- and the state governments are, in fact, sovereign under our Constitution.

Posted: Mon - February 23, 2009 at 12:18 PM

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The abominable Seventeenth

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