Although Stockton will serve from March 15, , to March 27, , the Senate eventually will declare the seat vacant. Supreme Court upholds the convictions of Ku Klux Klan members who were tried under federal civil rights statutes for the beating and intimidation of people seeking to vote in a congressional election. The Court finds that the power to protect voters comes from the authority assigned to Congress in the Constitution.
Even though the states primarily had protected the right to vote in federal elections before the federal law, the Court says the federal government has the authority to protect voting in federal elections when necessary. The federal law requires that the legislative chambers in each state meet separately, and name a senator by open vote. If the two chambers have not chosen the same person, the chambers are to meet in a joint session every day until one candidate receives a majority vote.
The law is the first change in the original process for selecting senators created by the framers, but it fails to remedy the deadlocks.
In , the Delaware legislature was so divided that the state legislature did not send a senator to Washington for four years. In fact, deadlocks increased significantly: 45 occurred between and in 20 states.
A constitutional amendment to elect senators by popular vote is proposed in Congress. The amendment will not pass until because of resistance in the Senate. From the s on, citizen pressure for direct elections had grown. By , the House will pass 19 resolutions calling for direct election of senators. In the presidential election of , the Populist Party incorporates the direct election of senators into its party platform, although neither the Democrats nor the Republicans pays much notice.
By , at least 29 states nominate senators either in party primaries or general elections. Joseph Bristow from Kansas, with the support of many senators elected after these state reforms, proposes a constitutional amendment without language dealing with race discrimination that had been included in earlier versions. Despite many political fights, the House passes the 17th Amendment and sends it to the states for ratification.
The entire ratification process takes less than a year to complete. The following year, , marks the first time all Senate elections are held by popular vote. In Newberry v. United States , a Senate candidate in a state primary election challenges the constitutionality of the Federal Corrupt Practices Act.
The candidate had been convicted of violating federal limits on the amount of money that could be used in primary and general elections. The Court notes that although the 17th Amendment changed who elects senators from state legislatures to voters in each state , it did not modify Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution. This provision gives states the power to determine the time, place and manner of holding Senate elections, unless Congress alters state rules.
Here, where Congress has specifically spoken, the federal rules are permissible. In Reed v. County Commissioners of Delaware County , the U. Supreme Court rules that a special committee of the Senate has the power to investigate a Pennsylvania Senate election. The Court holds that the 17th Amendment acknowledges a federal right to elect senators and that the Senate is authorized to protect these rights.
In United Public Workers v. Mitchell , the U. Supreme Court finds that the Hatch Act, a federal law that prohibits federal employees from participating in many electoral activities does not violate the First Amendment. In a strong dissent, Justice Hugo Black argues that the law muzzles several million citizens and threatens popular government, because it deprives citizens of the right to participate in the political process.
This concern about liberty-encroaching and special interest-responding legislation was especially acute among the Framers of the Constitution, who believed that state legislatures under the Articles of Confederation were overly-prone to these vices. In addition to these institutional roles, the Senate was also expected to play an anti-democratic function under the Constitution, serving as a sort of American House of Lords composed of men of substantial accomplishment, judgment, and independence, who would be above the rough-and-tumble of democratic politics.
This assumption accounts for many of the unique functions of the Senate that are not shared with the House, such as the power to advise and consent on appointments, to ratify treaties, and to try impeachments.
Historian C. Hoebeke has argued, however, that this project was doomed for failure from the outset, as state legislatures—notorious hotbeds of populism—provide an unlikely source for sober elections. To be sure, any effects of the Seventeenth Amendment must also be considered in combination with the Sixteenth Amendment, which permitted a federal income tax. Although it is difficult to isolate the effects of the Seventeenth Amendment, intuition suggests that the different pattern of the growth of the federal government in the twentieth century versus the pattern of the prior century, is attributable, at least in part, to the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment.
The Seventeenth Amendment also radically changed the structure of bicameralism, by increasing the degree of similarity between the constituencies of the House and Senate. Although Senators are still elected in statewide elections with larger constituencies, both bodies represent the people directly, thus eliminating the check of requiring different constituencies to consent to any laws. This change would be expected to increase the power of special-interest influence over the federal government.
It can be difficult to test this particular hypothesis; still, reasonable minds could conclude that the federal government in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been more engaged in redistribution schemes designed to reward particular special interests than in prior eras. Despite its essential role in the original constitutional structure, as a historical matter the overall record of the original Senate in executing its constitutional functions is somewhat mixed.
The Framers believed that the original Senate would be both a necessary and sufficient protection for the states against the federal government and an important check against interest groups. In this sense, the lasting testament of the original Senate is to identify the challenge of designing constitutional structures that can be sustained over the long run, especially in response to unanticipated events such as the rise of political parties and democratic forces.
Proponents of the Amendment argued that removing from state legislatures the power to choose U. Senators would make state democracy work better, allowing voters to focus on state issues when choosing state officials. When the Seventeenth Amendment is discussed today, however, this issue is largely ignored. Figures like Justice Antonin Scalia and Senator Mike Lee have criticized the Seventeenth Amendment because it removed a power through which state governments could control the federal government.
That is to say, they criticize the Seventeenth Amendment for harming states and state governments. As my work has shown , this is almost completely backwards. Requiring state legislatures to choose Senators made state legislative elections simply into proxies for choosing Senators.
Unless one takes a purely formal view, a rule that renders state elections useless as a means of creating representation and accountability for state officials should be seen as bad for the values of federalism.
Notably, support for the Seventeenth Amendment did not originate from national politicians. It is not hard to see why. For instance, in deciding whom to vote for in state legislative races in , voters in Illinois had to consider the weighty subjects of union and slavery because they were really choosing between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln.
Rather than allowing them to make that choice separately from trying to hold state senators responsible for the performance of state government, the pre-Seventeenth Amendment Constitution forced them to weigh these decisions together. As a result, state issues became barely a passing interest in elections for state legislature.
The rise of the People's Party, commonly referred to as the Populist Party, added motivation for making the Senate more directly accountable to the people. During the s, the House of Representatives passed several resolutions proposing a constitutional amendment for the direct election of senators. Each time, however, the Senate refused to even take a vote.
When it seemed unlikely that both houses of Congress would pass legislation proposing an amendment for direct election, many states changed strategies. Article V of the Constitution states that Congress must call a convention for proposing amendments when two-thirds of the state legislatures apply for one. Although the method had never previously been used, many states began sending Congress applications for conventions. As the number of applications neared the two-thirds bar, Congress finally acted.
In , the House of Representatives passed House Joint Resolution 39 proposing a constitutional amendment for direct election of senators.
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