The Utah Senate asked Congress to repeal the 17th Amendment, which was ratified under the Progressive’s of 1913. Utah has boldly challenged a system that was never the intent of the Founding Fathers and suggests that the 17th Amendment has resulted in Senators being bound to special interest groups, that donate enormous sums of money for the Senator’s re-election, and not representing the needs of the people of Utah.
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Al Jackson of Utah, believes that Senators need to “come home every weekend and take direction from their state legislative (sic) body and from the House and the Governor on how they should vote in the upcoming week.”
Passing with 20-6 SJR2 was sent to the House. It demands that Congress repeal the 17th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Read a history of the 17th Amendment and why Utah has made such a bold call to action on the following page.
Repealing the 17th would return an awful lot of power back to the states – where it belongs.
It was a bad idea from the start, direct election upset the delicate balance of the Founder’s original provision.
YES! Finally… someone is starting to get it!!!
Kris Ryder
How do you figure? State Legislatures would
Go back to appointing Senators and 23 States currently are GOP trifectas…governor, House and Senate.
Only 5 are Dem Trifectas.
Many others have at least one GOP chamber.
So instead of special interest groups spending huge on 100 seats in the US Senate, you’re going to divide all that money to the state senators so that they elect the special interests cronies. How is this going to make things better? Getting rid of corporate and special interest money in politics would be better, but we know that won’t happen
Mike George do you know the ONLY way the constitution can be changed. You say “a Republican” it takes 36 states, you need an education, moron.
My guess…. the ones stumping for handing state legislator over to business to be run completely behind closed doors ….are invested in said companies.
The original design was that the House represented ‘the People’, the Senate represented ‘the States’, and the President sat in between those two. That’s why you see the terms you do (2/4/6) and why originally the House was directly elected, Senators were appointed by State governments, and Presidents were elected by an Electoral College where each State got the same number of votes as their total of Representatives and Senators. It’s why States have different numbers of Representatives but all have the same number of Senators. It’s a carefully balanced design and every time we touch it we make it worse.
And I got to say that seeing a judge posting his support that states should be ran behind closed doors “legislating citizens without citizen input” is fucking scary.
Amending the Constitution according to the methods outlined by the Constitution is treason? I guess that creating the Bill of Rights is treason, given that they were not a part of the Constitution that the first federal officials swore to protect.