Mark Levin arrives at the truth: The US Senate has no purpose

He's saying so right now in the monologue, that since the 17th Amendment was passed the Senate has stopped functioning for the purpose for which the constitution had designed it.

It is indeed useless.

 

Popular election of senators made the US Senate a "Super House", which was a kind of a power grab away from the US House where popular power was distributed among many. 

 

Now popular power is concentrated among few.

 

The Senate still acts as a barrier to the House's energy, but it no longer reflects the direct will of the state legislatures which once appointed them.

Campaign finance reform: Repeal the 17th Amendment

In 2012 there were 33 Senate seats up for grabs, and the cost to a candidate of winning one averaged $10.5 million, if the popular estimates of what winning candidates raised are to be believed. That's something like $700 million total spent by both the winners and losers.

For all 435 House seats the candidates spent something like $1.5 billion, with $1.7 million spent on average by each winner.

With $6 billion total spent on the 2012 Congressional election from all sources thanks to additional PAC spending courtesy of a US Supreme Court ruling, the candidates themselves therefore spent at most $2.2 billion while outside interests spent an additional $3.8 billion to elect both "your" representative and "your" Senator. No wonder you like them so much.

The five most expensive races alone in 2012 were for Senate seats, and cost from all sources in excess of $376 million, $142 million of which came from "outside" sources, 38% of the total. Assuming that $700 million was spent by all 33 Senate candidates themselves in 2012, and adding an additional 38% from outside sources, that would put the cost of the 2012 Senate election from all sources close to $1 billion for just the 33 seats. For the whole lot of 100 Senators, then, we are in reality talking $3 billion for the whole Senate, plus the $5 billion for the whole House in that snapshot of time in 2012, for a total of $8 billion.

That makes your Senator a $30 million target, while your representative is a paltry $11.5 million one by comparison.

You could fix 72% of what's wrong with our politics in this country in an instant by repealing the popular election of Senators.

Just undo it. 

Constitutional parchment was no "practical security" against the US Senate's ObamaCare, was it?

After discriminating, therefore, in theory, the several classes of power, as they may in their nature be legislative, executive, or judiciary, the next and most difficult task is to provide some practical security for each, against the invasion of the others.

What this security ought to be, is the great problem to be solved. Will it be sufficient to mark, with precision, the boundaries of these departments, in the constitution of the government, and to trust to these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power? This is the security which appears to have been principally relied on by the compilers of most of the American constitutions. But experience assures us, that the efficacy of the provision has been greatly overrated; and that some more adequate defense is indispensably necessary for the more feeble, against the more powerful, members of the government. The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex. The founders of our republics have so much merit for the wisdom which they have displayed, that no task can be less pleasing than that of pointing out the errors into which they have fallen. A respect for truth, however, obliges us to remark, that they seem never for a moment to have turned their eyes from the danger to liberty from the overgrown and all-grasping prerogative of an hereditary magistrate, supported and fortified by an hereditary branch of the legislative authority. They seem never to have recollected the danger from legislative usurpations, which, by assembling all power in the same hands, must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by executive usurpations. In a government where numerous and extensive prerogatives are placed in the hands of an hereditary monarch, the executive department is very justly regarded as the source of danger, and watched with all the jealousy which a zeal for liberty ought to inspire. In a democracy, where a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative functions, and are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues of their executive magistrates, tyranny may well be apprehended, on some favorable emergency, to start up in the same quarter. But in a representative republic, where the executive magistracy is carefully limited; both in the extent and the duration of its power; and where the legislative power is exercised by an assembly, which is inspired, by a supposed influence over the people, with an intrepid confidence in its own strength; which is sufficiently numerous to feel all the passions which actuate a multitude, yet not so numerous as to be incapable of pursuing the objects of its passions, by means which reason prescribes; it is against the enterprising ambition of this department that the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions. The legislative department derives a superiority in our governments from other circumstances. Its constitutional powers being at once more extensive, and less susceptible of precise limits, it can, with the greater facility, mask, under complicated and indirect measures, the encroachments which it makes on the co-ordinate departments. It is not unfrequently a question of real nicety in legislative bodies, whether the operation of a particular measure will, or will not, extend beyond the legislative sphere.

On the other side, the executive power being restrained within a narrower compass, and being more simple in its nature, and the judiciary being described by landmarks still less uncertain, projects of usurpation by either of these departments would immediately betray and defeat themselves [don't laugh, he really wrote this]. Nor is this all: as the legislative department alone has access to the pockets of the people, and has in some constitutions full discretion, and in all a prevailing influence, over the pecuniary rewards of those who fill the other departments, a dependence is thus created in the latter, which gives still greater facility to encroachments of the former. I have appealed to our own experience for the truth of what I advance on this subject. ...

The conclusion which I am warranted in drawing from these observations is, that a mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments, is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.

-- James Madison, 1788 (Federalist 48, emphases added)

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Repeal the 17th Amendment.

If Rep. Justin Amash Were A Real Conservative, He Wouldn't "Run" For Senate

Real conservatives want to repeal the 17th Amendment, not perpetuate it. That Rep. Amash is "'intrigued' by the prospect of going for Levin's seat" in just his second term as a representative betrays his ambition, not his conservatism. If he cared about his constituents he'd serve them, not use them as a stepping stone for his own career. He's done nothing to represent his congressional district, and he'll do nothing to represent the State of Michigan as senator. All he'll represent is his personal conception of the libertarian ideology, and not much else. If you want a mascot for your eccentricity, by all means vote for Justin Amash.

Story here.

Senator Jim DeMint is NOT a Conservative

If he were, he'd be doing everything he can to repeal the 17th Amendment.

Raising money to elect so-called conservatives is raising money to perpetuate the status quo post. Originalism isn't just for the Supremes.

He's a phony.

Senator Reid Goes Nuclear, So Does Senator McConnell

“We are fundamentally turning the Senate into the House."

-- Senator Mitch McConnell, R-KY, quoted here.

Sorry, Mitch, but the 17th Amendment already did that in 1913.

Nearly One Week On Obama Still Can't Find a Democrat to Sponsor His Jobs Bill

Pass this bill! Pass this bill!

But no Democrat has filed the bill in the US House.

Maybe because Democrats went to the mat for ObamaCare in March 2010, and lost big for it in November 2010.

Democrats in the House are obviously letting The One twist in the wind right now because The One did nothing to help them win re-election last autumn. Obama let them twist in the wind while he went on vacation every six weeks during 2010.

To rub the Democrats' noses in it, Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert finally has taken advantage of the lack of initiative and co-opted the bill with one of his own by the same name, as reported here:

President Obama repeatedly asked members of Congress to pass the American Jobs Act last week. But when no Democrat filed Obama’s bill after he presented it to Congress, a conservative congressman swiped the name for his own legislation.

The American Jobs Act introduced in the House of Representatives looks quite different from the version President Obama outlined in his speech to Congress. Instead of hiking taxes on working Americans to pay for another stimulus, Rep. Louie Gohmert’s (R-TX) legislation offers a tax cut.

UPDATE: Gohmert’s bill now has a number. It’s HR 2911.

Democrats can't say Gohmert didn't give them plenty of time, considering the urgency of the matter as put forward by Obama.

The fact of the matter is, when Obama and the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate and the Executive from the beginning of 2009 into early 2010, it was the Senate which stalled almost everything sent to it by Speaker Pelosi and Company. Hundreds of measures passed by the Democrat House never saw the light of day in the Democrat Senate.

The point is that the problem for "legislative progress" is "structural" as the economists want it. The problem is with the US Senate, no matter which party controls it.

Gov. Rick Perry is wise in recognizing that the problem specifically has to do with who elects the Senate, which is no longer the State Legislatures, the way prescribed by the Constitution.

The consequence of the 17th Amendment is that we now have two legislative houses in competition for mere populist sentiment, which is a recipe for inaction, not action, because the legislative cycle distributes populist urgency differently in the two houses of our legislature. In changing the manner of election in the 17th Amendment, they forgot to change the timing.

As it is, only one third of the Senate is up for election/re-election every two years with the House, which still keeps most of the Senate largely behind the schedule of the mere popular whim, just as the Constitution intended, and the popular whim changes so fast these days that it's usually only a Senator (!) who notices it, and he or she bides his or her time, knowing popular whim will be forgotten in two years' time, or four. Better to wait and catch the next wave, which will doubtless be different.

Obama should be so smart.

Pretty Boy Hannity Gets a Lesson in the Constitution

From the American Thinker, here:

Dear Sean:

Concerning the 17th amendment, the argument for its repeal absolutely centers around states' rights.  If Senators are elected by elected reps and senators, they are more likely to defend their state against federal encroachments (upholding the 10th amendment), than they are if elected by the general population.  Any federal program - ObamaCare, the financial reform bill, etc., -  which increases burdens on state budgets would not sit well with Senators answerable to congressional bodies in their state.

Greg Halvorson