The framers had two things in mind with the original composition of the Senate who they
essentially thought that in contract to the House, which would always be populist and
sort of defined by hardscrabble political campaigning, the Senate instead would elevate
the best people; business people, war heroes, lawyers; and so they would bring probity and
judgment into the body.
The House and the Senate were two parts of one whole, the U.S. Congress, and the House
was elected every two years.
They had smaller districts, and people could register their satisfaction or dissatisfaction
pretty easily.
They wanted to make sure that popular sentiment didn't really determine whatever the whole
Congress produced, and that's why they had s- state legislators elect U.S. senators.
The senators would be sort of ambassadors for the state, protecting the powers of the
state by protecting the powers of the state legislature to prevent federal encroachment
and federal overreaching against the states.
It was supposed to accomplish the goal's bicameralism.
Bicameralism is the idea that by having two bodies that are chosen in two different ways,
it would increase the potential that laws that were enacted would promote the public
interest rather than the interest of what they called factions and what today we call
special interests.
There were unique powers given to the Senate that were tied to the idea that the Senate
would be elected in a different way from the House, so for example, the ability to ratify
treaties was tied to the idea that senators would be these people who were worldly people.
The power to sit as a jury for impeachment, that makes sense in a world in which senators
are indirectly chosen for their character and rather than in partisan political elections.
There were numerous difficulties with electing senators in state legislatures.
It was bound with corruption, it was very insular, and it was detrimental I think to
democracy.
Nearly 30% of all the elections from 1870 to 1913 were deadlocked.
Even when you had the same party controlling the House and Senate at the state level, they
would fight with each other over who would get to go to Washington and be the senator.
Although the state legislatures are often blamed for being the ones who are incapable
of doing their job to- to select senators, the real problem was actually federal law
that required state legislatures to select a senator by a majority vote rather than simply
a plurality.
This happens quite frequently in senate elections today where if you have a third party involved,
you might end up with the winner getting 45%, the second place person getting 40%, and the
third-place person getting 15% or something like that.
Objection to the state legislature election of U.S. senators started right after the Constitution
was adopted, but it didn't really catch fire until the 1880s.
There were a lot of social movements where people were getting directly involved in politics
at the grassroots level and they were coming into full fruition during this time, so it
began to seem very anachronistic to have a mechanism where people couldn't vote directly
for senators when all around the population social movements, grassroots activism, political
participation was increasing each decade.
States started adopting various means to introduce popular election into their senate elections.
First, the rise of party primaries where the- the- the candidate for each party would be
chosen by voters in a primary.
Eventually, many states adopt what was called the Oregon Plan, which is a situation in which
a state legislator would actually put on the ballot a statement that said whether or not
they would support the people's vote for United States senator, or they remained free to use
their own judgment.
The Seventeenth Amendment, which was the amendment that created direct election of senators and
it was adopted in 1913, grew out of this large movement for greater personal and individual
representation in American politics, so a lot of different forces converged to want
this amendment to come to fruition, and it- it came about because the politicians running
for office knew that voters would respond to their messages of greater inclusivity and
more participation.
There was opposition to the Seventeenth Amendment led forcefully by senators such as Henry Cabot
Lodge, who was a republican of Massachusetts.
He was a traditionalist.
He believed that the people shouldn't have a direct say, that the Senate's rule was to
check popular sentiment and popular passion, and that if direct elections occurred, the
wrong types of people would be elected to the U.S. Senate and the power of the Senate
would diminish relative to its counterpart, the House of Representatives.
One significant difference we see between the current Senate and the Senate prior to
the Seventeenth Amendment is that prior to the Seventeenth Amendment, rotation through
government and in and out of government was much more common for senators.
So for example, Daniel Webster left the Senate to become Secretary of State and then stepped
back into the Senate because he knew he could step aside and essentially the state legislature
would hold his seat for him.
If you still had state legislators selecting senators, it might be more likely that the
senators would themselves feel more beholden to the state as a unit rather than their own
individual careers.
On the other hand, there are times when individual senators act on their own in the Senate.
For example, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is known for going off on his own trail in
the Senate to preserve individual rights, particularly the right to speech and the right,
uh, to be protected from government search and seizure.
These are fundamental rights, and if senators didn't feel that they had some sense of independence
by virtue of being directly elected, they might not pursue those avenues and then you
might see a further erosion of individual rights.