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by Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.

There's been a lot of yammering in the Senate chambers about the Constitution, as if anyone there takes its original structure seriously. In fact, the Senate itself is no longer what the framers intended. If it were, most of these birds wouldn't even be in office.

The Senate was once an appointed body whose purpose was to guard the interests of the states against the central government. Thanks to the horrible 17th Amendment, it became a national body caught up in the usual election rackets and in thrall to special-interest groups.

The process by which this dramatic transformation took place is one of the least-known aspects of constitutional history. But the effects were devastating for the cause of human liberty. In the federal form of government, the people as citizens of their respective states controlled Washington. Today, the people in their states have no effective means to restrain the federal government that controls them.

The original structure was laid out in Article 1. "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof." The idea of an appointed Senate was deliberate. The people to whom they were responsible were the elected representatives closest to the people. State legislatures consisted of friends and neighbors, and they appointed respected and landed members of the community they represented, who in turn fought against taxes and other federal intrusions.

A vote cast in the states had direct impact on affairs in Washington. The U.S. Senate's primary attention was directed, not toward Washington or a national constituency or the next election, but toward the states as independent juridical units. The senators' concern was protecting the rights of these units, and guarding the liberties of the citizens of the states against encroachments by a rapacious executive and judiciary.

Through the Senate, the states wielded massive control over the central government. The Senate has always been the "aristocratic" body of Congress, but in a real if indirect sense, it was once the body closest to average people. Senators did not have campaign war chests to fill and spend. They didn't worry about paying back election bribes because there were no mass elections.

The disaster occurred in 1913, at the height of the progressive era when the great god of American politics became not liberty but democracy. Law and legislation in the 19th century was too fixed, the progressives claimed. What was needed was a much more expansive government that directly reflected the day-by-day democratic passions of the public--precisely what Tocqueville warned against.

For the advocates of big government, the model was the House of Representatives. Before Lincoln's war, it had distinguished itself as a hotbed of centralist sentiment. It advocated and obtained war against the South. After the war, the House imposed a military dictatorship on the Southern states, and impeached a president who was trying to stop the tyranny. For good reason, the statists dreamed of making the Senate a carbon copy of the House.

Woodrow Wilson, consistent with the times, had also come to believe that it was God's plan that all governments should be directly elected by the people. Monarchy was out; in fact it had to be destroyed wherever it existed. Even the traditional American republic was insufficiently democratic in the Rousseauian sense. The Senate as an appointed body was a standing rebuke to this maniacal vision.

Nearly overnight, the character of the U.S. system of government changed. We got the income tax, which made all income vulnerable to confiscation and invited the government to pry into our private lives. We got the Federal Reserve, which in time would destroy the gold standard, the best check on government power ever known. In addition, we got U.S. entry into a European conflict that was none of our business, and a vast step-up in statism at home (the usual result of war).

With the 17th Amendment, we suffered a fundamental and permanent attack on the original character of the Senate itself. The new amendment read: "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof." It seemed to be a small change, but its effects would alter the entire federal arrangement constructed by the framers.

Suddenly, state legislatures were disempowered from the affairs of the central government. They were reduced in stature from powerful bodies that played an essential watchdog role into mere lobbyists dependent on favors from the Congress and the executive. The U.S. Senate did indeed become like the House: grasping, conniving, and slavish in its attachments to special-interest legislation.

Today, as the Senate examines the question of whether Clinton should be removed from office, its members are not thinking about what is best for the liberty of the citizens of the states. They are loathe to apply the law independent of establishment opinion. And what they fear is not the consternation of their state legislators, but the next election and their national standing. It should not surprise anyone when they play the coward in the face of media and executive branch pressure.

In light of this history, it is preposterous for the Senate to be blabbing on about the Federalist Papers and the framers' intentions with regard to the impeachment power. It is not even the body it was established to be. Hence it cannot and will not exercise the power over the executive state that it was supposed to wield by its very structure.

Terrible amendments to the Constitution were added early this century, but history has shown that they need not do permanent damage. The 18th amendment imposed prohibition in 1919, but in a great triumph for freedom, it was repealed with the 21st Amendment in 1933. As the Senate caves to the usual pressure groups and lets Clinton off the hook, citizens should retaliate by reversing the 17th Amendment, too.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

This article originally appeared in WorldNetDaily on February 4, 1999 (www.worldnetdaily.com). © 1999 Western Journalism Center. Reprinted with permission.

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