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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 7/19/17

ALEC Is Talking About Changing the Way Senators Are Elected and Taking Away Your Vote

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From The Nation

A proposed resolution advocates for overturning the 17th Amendment so Republican-controlled state legislatures could pick senators.

The United States Senate is an undemocratic institution. Just do the math: Progressive California Senator Kamala Harris was elected in 2016 with 7,542,753 votes. Yet her vote on issues such as health-care reform counts for no more than that of conservative Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi, who was elected in 2014 with 121,554 votes.

This is an absurd imbalance. In fact, the only thing that would make it more absurd would be if voters were removed from the equation altogether.

Say "hello" to the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, the corporate-funded project to impose a top-down right-wing agenda on the states. ALEC is considering whether to adopt a new piece of "model legislation" that proposes to do away with an elected Senate.

The idea of reversing 104 years of representative democracy and returning to the bad old days when senators were chosen via backroom deals between wealthy campaign donors, corporate lobbyists, and crooked legislators, is not new. The John Birch Society peddled the proposal decades ago. But with the rise of the "Tea Party" movement, the notion moved into the conservative mainstream.

Then -- Texas Governor Rick Perry argued in 2012 that the direct election of senators "took the states out of the process." Several Republican senators apparently agree, with Utah Senator Mike Lee referring to the 17th Amendment as "a mistake" and Arizona Senator Jeff Flake saying, "I think it's better as it reinforces the notion of federalism to have senators appointed by state legislatures." What was once a fringe fantasy is being taken ever more seriously by conservative strategists.

Last year, ALEC published an article by a so-called "subject matter expert" arguing that the popular election of senators is "disenfranchising the States." The article made an old-school states' rights argument for taking the power to choose senators away from the people and giving it to the politicians who sit in state legislatures.

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