Should We Repeal the 17th Amendment?

If you want a real national government than the 17th Amendment is your thing.

Which is why I think it should be repealed. I discuss this in Episode 111 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

It would be a major stretch to suggest that all of our problems developed after the ratification of the 17th Amendment. For those that don’t know, that amendment to the Constitution gave us direct election of United States Senators.

It is true that even before this amendment was ratified, several states had already been using de facto direct election methods.

That was fine. Not every state had to do it. Don’t subject the purists to progressive madness.

But once the 17th was glued to the Constitution, real federalism–already on life support–died.

You see, the Senate was supposed to be the State check on the entire system.

That is how it was sold to the states during ratification, even by ardent nationalists like Alexander Hamilton.

Of course he lied, and with the 17th Amendment, Hamilton’s nationalist dream reached another level.

The states were cut out of the now “national” government. They could no longer block anything in Washington through Washington itself. It would take interposition or nullification to accomplish that.

Hamilton, in fact, wanted to reduce the states to corporations. He failed in Philadelphia but eventually won in Washington. Such is the fact of the nationalist myth in American history.

It seems everyone thinks our “national government” was the dream from the beginning. It was for some, but they were outvoted and outgunned during ratification. It took deception and lies to make it happen and no one was better at it than Hamilton.

My favorite chapter in How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America is “From Philadelphia to Poughkeepsie” where I expose Hamilton’s duplicity. It is worth the price of the book.

If you pre-order two copies before 11:59 PM Pacific on September 17, you can get a preview of that chapter through the six lecture course on Hamilton.