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.
Blue falcon huh?
Congress can’t repeal a part of the constitution.
You mean like repealing prohibition? There already is a precedent
Leave well enough alone.
Repealing the 17th is a good thing. It was passed to take away the states’ seat at the table in the fed govt. why do we even need a senate if we already have a popularly elected body in the house?
I’d rather have direct control of who represents me in DC then entrusting that power to the notoriously corrupt New York state legislature. That’s leaving the fox in charge of the hen house.
I have been advocation for this for about ten years. It would get the special interest groups out of the senate, make senators responsible to their states again and hopefully limit the terms.
For those that are saying no to this, the 17th amendment has taken what the founders intended, having the Senate responsible directly to the states, and given us a senate that is responsible to special interest groups, given us unfunded mandates tithe states, Obama Care, and was one of the first amendments that trashed the constitution.
Be very careful about tampering with the constitution.
When I was in law school in the early 1980s, we had a Con Law professor who was a disillusioned Camelot-era liberal. He predicted that there would be a new constitution in about 2020-25, because liberals and progressives would convince the public that the old one was obsolete, not adapted to modern technology, and it was written without the input of women and blacks.
But he predicted the new constitution would:
1. Limit free speech, assembly, associations, and movement and travel.
2. The second amendment would be gone.
3. The fourth amendment would class nearly everything as a regulatory search and probable cause and warrants would be history.
4. The fifth amendment would be drastically changed so that the prosecution could comment on, and a judge or jury could consider as evidence of guilt or innocence, if the defendant made no explanatory statement to police or didn’t testify in his own trial.
5. Double jeopardy protection and reasonable conditions and monetary amounts of bail would be gone. Witnesses could be heard by video or depositions without cross examination.
6. The power flow of the 10th amendment would be reversed so that unspecified powers are held by the G and not the states.
In short, the kind of borderline despotism they have in most other places in the world that so many liberals and progressives think are so enlightened and should serve as our example, although the colonists went to war 240 years ago to get rid of.
Should be the 16th