by Stephen Soukup
The Seventeenth Amendment reshaped the Senate from a body tied to the states into a national political arena defined by permanent ambition and escalating federal power.
For most Americans—or at least most Americans
with even a remedial education in civics—the phrase “separation of
powers” usually explains the tripartite nature of the federal
government. The Founders, in their wisdom, divided that government into
branches: the legislative branch, which debates and enacts laws; the
executive branch, which enforces the laws; and the judicial branch,
which interprets the laws and ensures that they are compliant with one
another and with constitutional principles. It’s a nice, clean, simple,
and, above all, effective system for limiting the power of the federal
polity. It ensures that laws are carefully and thoughtfully created and
enforced in accordance with the idea that “all men are created equal and
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [and] that
among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
People (understandably) tend to forget that the Founders’ separation
of powers referred not only to the construction of the federal
government but also to the construction of the federal republic.
To the Founders, the states were considered the primary site of
governance, while the federal entity had only a “few and defined”
responsibilities. The Constitution was crafted specifically and
purposefully to limit government’s ability to interfere in the lives of
the people by separating the governance role among several different
entities.
Ironically, the “Federalists,” whose positions were recapped in 85
famous “papers,” were the “big government” types of their era. The
Federalists are often cited today (as they will be in this column) in
defense of a small federal government and a nation dominated by state
interests. Nevertheless, they wrote their invaluable papers specifically
to convince the skeptics—the anti-Federalists—that a strong federal
government was necessary at all.
The case for a limited federal government and much more formidable
state governments is made throughout the Constitution, most notably in
the now-largely-forgotten Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to
the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the
States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” That
case is also famously made in Federalist Papers Nos. 44, 45,
and 46, which explain in great detail how “the states are the protectors
of liberty” and how the federal government is dependent for its
existence on the states and their voluntary concessions of power. The
case is also made, albeit far less famously, in Federalist Papers
Nos. 62 and 63. Among other things, those two essays defend the
establishment of a Senate whose members were selected indirectly, by
state legislatures rather than by the people themselves. The House of
Representatives was designed to represent the will of the people,
whereas the Senate was intended to represent the will (and the rights
and prerogatives) of the states:
It is equally unnecessary to dilate on
the appointment of senators by the State legislatures. Among the various
modes which might have been devised for constituting this branch of the
government, that which has been proposed by the convention is probably
the most congenial with the public opinion. It is recommended by the
double advantage of favoring a select appointment, and of giving to the
State governments such an agency in the formation of the federal
government as must secure the authority of the former, and may form a
convenient link between the two systems.
Unfortunately, the Constitutional order established by the Founders
existed for only about a century. On the surface, the “great” men of the
Progressive Era could not have appeared more different from one
another, highly unlikely to unite in purpose to undermine the Founders’
republic and change the very nature of the American nation. That’s what
they did, however, even if unintentionally. The three greatest
Progressive “reformers”—Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and Teddy
Roosevelt—shared a small handful of ideas and ideals in common, despite
their superficial differences—and among these was their loathing for the
Constitution and the limits it placed on the federal government. All
three believed in the necessity of a central authority, dedicated to the
principles of the science of man and operated by the best and the
brightest society could offer, namely themselves.
By way of example, in his first annual message to the nation,
Roosevelt derided the Constitution and the federalism so prized by its
framers, declaring that they had been woefully mistaken when they
“accepted as a matter of course that the several States were the proper
authorities to regulate, so far as was then necessary, the
comparatively insignificant and strictly localized corporate bodies of
the day.” He forgave the Founders personally (and ever so graciously)
but nevertheless insisted that “the conditions today are wholly
different” than they were in 1788, “and wholly different action is
called for.” “The old laws, and the old customs which had almost the
binding force of law,” he continued, were no longer sufficient “to
regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth.” Most tellingly,
he suggested that fate had empowered him to act on the people’s “sincere
conviction that combination and concentration should be, not
prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled; and
in my judgment this conviction is right.”
Conservatives today generally acknowledge that the Progressive Era
reforms most devastating to the Founders’ Constitution were the
establishment of a graduated income tax (through the passage of the
Sixteenth Amendment) and the creation of the Federal Reserve. Often,
they forget the damage done by the Seventeenth Amendment, which ended
the “selection” of senators and replaced it with their direct election.
George Mason of Virginia had argued that the point of indirect
election of senators was to provide state legislatures with “some means
of defending themselves against encroachments of the national
government.” Madison himself had argued that it helped ensure that the
government remained “federal” and not “national,” thereby safeguarding
the separation of powers. Massachusetts Congressman Fisher Ames, a
dedicated Federalist and, as such, one of the more insistent defenders
of the federal government, insisted that the indirect election of
senators was the key to maintaining the nature of the republic and that
without it, the whole experiment would fail:
The state governments are essential parts of the system … The
senators represent the sovereignty of the states; … they are in the
quality of ambassadors of the states … [But suppose] that they [were] to
be chosen by the people at large … Whom, in that case, would they
represent? Not the legislatures of the states, but the people. This
would totally obliterate the federal features of the Constitution.
Despite all of this, the Progressives won the argument, and in 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified by the states.
All of this is worth keeping in mind today, as the various political
controversies of the day unfold. For example, President Trump has been
fighting, very prominently, with several senators from his own party.
This past week, Trump or his surrogates clashed repeatedly with Thom
Tillis of North Carolina, who has been a sharp critic of the White House
and went so far as to call the president’s advisers “stupid.” Trump has
also had high-profile clashes with the Senate Majority Leader, South
Dakota’s John Thune, who has repeatedly thwarted the administration’s
attempts to fill open positions in the government through recess
appointments and who insists that he is powerless to pass the SAVE Act,
which would require ID to vote in federal elections. Trump also, rather
conspicuously, endorsed Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, in his
race to unseat incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn.
Now, one needn’t be naïve enough to believe that Trump endorsed
Paxton in service to the states’ interests rather than his own to see
this dysfunction as a significant problem. The Federalists (in this
case, Madison and/or Hamilton) saw the indirect election of senators as
one means to avoid such drama and to maintain the people’s trust in the
government and its institutions. And clearly, that is desperately needed
today. The Founders never expected the president and senators from his
own party to quarrel over their personal political predilections.
Indeed, the Founders didn’t really expect senators to have personal
political predilections at all.
On the other side of the aisle, of course, the people of Maine seem
poised to elect a political neophyte with a prominent Nazi tattoo and a
history of problematic online behavior, while Nebraskans are flirting
with an “independent” candidate whose views on social issues—especially
abortion—differ dramatically from their own. Both men promise a
working-class “revolution” against the ruling class, while both embrace
largely amorphous platforms that, on the rare occasion they do get specific, generally support longstanding ruling-class policies.
The history of the American constitutional republic is largely
divided into halves: 124 years before the ratification of the
Seventeenth Amendment and 113 years after. In the first half, senators
mostly did their jobs for a limited time and returned home. Three former
senators were elected president—James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew
Jackson—and only two senators, Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas, ran for
president while in the Senate. In the second half, by contrast, the
Senate has been seen by senators less as a temporary position in service
to their home states and more as a permanent position of public
prominence or a springboard to bigger things. Since 1972 alone, 50
different sitting or former U.S. senators have run for president a
collective 62+ times. Major party nominees and serious contenders have
included John F. Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Hubert Humphrey, George
McGovern, Bob Dole, John Kerry, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Bernie
Sanders, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and many
others. Harding, Kennedy, and Obama were elected directly from the
Senate, while Biden and Lyndon Johnson were senators before becoming
vice president. Additionally, of the ten longest-serving senators in
history, all ten were elected after the Seventeenth Amendment.
It goes without saying that the indirect election of senators was
hardly perfect, and it did, indeed, enable a great deal of corruption
during the Gilded Age. But then, the Gilded Age produced corruption in
nearly every institution, and it’s not as if corruption in the Senate
has been eliminated in the last century. More to the point, there is
little question that the alignment of senators’ views with those of
their state legislatures was a significant factor in the obstinacy of
the Southern states in the fight over slavery, which is why the effort
to change the process began in the aftermath of the Civil War, even
before the Progressive Era officially began. That said, the Civil Rights
Act and the official end of Jim Crow were protested vehemently by
popularly elected Southern Democratic senators and were achieved, by and
large, only because the old Confederacy was, by the early 1960s,
significantly outnumbered.
The American Founders were an unusually smart, prescient, and prudent
group of men. The Progressives, while mostly well-meaning, were notably
less so. They saw real problems and offered what they saw as real
solutions, but did so far less judiciously and cautiously than their
predecessors had done. While it is hardly fair to say that all
our governmental problems today are relics of the Progressive reforms,
many were. The size and scope of the federal government and the general
sense that the Senate exists principally to advance the interests of its
occupants are just two of the most pronounced.
Stephen R. Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/05/25/the-progressive-senate-and-its-discontents/
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