Democracy broke the Senate
Jacob Harold Gallinger was the longest serving member of the US Senate at the time when the 17th Amendment ended the practice of state legislatures choosing Senators in favor of direct elections. Gallinger had been in office for twenty-two years when he became Dean of the Senate. Had he been serving that length of time today, he would rank all the way back at seventeenth on the seniority list, with less than half the time in office of the current longest-serving member, Pat Leahy, first elected in 1974.
Supporters of the 17th Amendment won it’s passage on a wave of populist sentiment while claiming that corruption, such as the buying of votes of state legislators, was rampant and that deadlocks in those same state legislatures often resulted in delays in the choosing of Senators, delays that would leave states without representation. However, there were only a handful of cases of alleged impropriety over more than a century of legislative election of Senators. Deadlocks were more frequent, especially among newly admitted states with inexperienced legislators, but were still remained unusual and in many ways self-correcting.
Today our direct election Senate campaigns frequently turn on fundraising amounts and appeals to the partisan base. Most voters would scoff at the notion that our modern process, driven by money and stacking the deck in favor of incumbents, is less corrupt than nearly any alternative method. Not only are direct elections now primarily financial contests, but they also removed from Senators the role of representing the interests of state governments. The Constitution explicitly made the House to be representative of the people, altering the Senate so that it is beholden to the same constituency removed one of the checks and balances that the Founders believed were so important. Over the past century there have been innumerable extensive federal intrusions into the prerogatives of state and local government, causing ever more regional and local issues to be decided in the District of Columbia out of the reach of you and I, ironically undermining the power of individuals to influence decisions that affect their daily lives through a change that was sold as empowering each voter.
The average age of a US Senator today is 64. For the first ninety years of the Senate’s existence the average age was below 55. The average years of service of an incumbent Senator was more than double in 2007 of what it was in 1907. Of the twenty-five Senators who served the longest, from Milton Young with just under 36 years to Robert Byrd with over 51 years, only one was in office before direct elections were enacted and 16 of Francis Warren’s 37 years in office were after the change.
Returning to the original practice of having state legislatures choose the members of the US Senate would bring back an important part of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances and provide a voice for the governments of the individual states that is sorely lacking in this modern era of federal overreach. Continuing the way it is now means the US Senate will continue to be a body of aged incumbents, difficult to dislodge and answerable to their financial backers rather than those largely forgotten individual voters.
