The long-forgotten 17th Amendment — the one that gave us direct election of senators — has suddenly moved to center stage in the new debate over constitutional first principles fostered by the Tea Party movement.
Conservative commentators like Glenn Beck are tracing what they call the death of states’ rights and the rise of overweening federal power to enactment of the amendment in 1913, because, they contend, it made senators less accountable to the states from which they are elected. “One of the dumbest things we ever did,” Mike Huckabee proclaimed on his radio show, and Fox News legal commentator Andrew Napolitano calls the 17th Amendment “the only part of the Constitution that is itself unconstitutional.”
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