The dramatic events in Washington, with the seemingly impossible suddenly appearing possible, invite us to unleash our dreams. What kinds of fundamental reforms are needed?
I would like to see the bicameral Congress restored. It was obliterated in 1913 with one Constitutional amendment that hardly anyone truly understood at the time. What they did seemed like an advance on democracy. What it achieved was to wreck the functioning of the federal legislature.
The Framers set up Congress with a bicameral structure that roughly paralleled the British Parliament, which has a House of Lords and a House of Commons. They were supposed to represent different interests and constituencies, one for the people and one for the institutional stakeholders who had done so much in the past to guarantee the rights of Englishmen against arbitrary edicts from the king.
The wisdom of those times, and it is still true, is that liberty is best protected by institutional resistance from below. It was generally understood that individuals alone stood little chance of countering the advances of tyrants but landowners, localities, and major forces at lower levels of society had the resources to marshal resistance against the center.
This belief was the foundation of the U.S. Constitution, which had a legislative branch consisting of two equal but very different parts: a House of Representatives and a Senate. The House was to be elected by the people. The Senate was designed to represent the states in a federalist structure. For this reason, the Senate consisted of people appointed to the task by the legislatures of the state. Their primary loyalties would be to the whole of the geography and population of the state.
It was a brilliant structure that served this country well from the Founding through the 20th century. Incredibly, a huge error was made in 1913, a time when the intellectuals were running wild with reformist schemes and grand new experiments in governance. This generation gave us the income tax, the central bank, and also blew up the bicameral model of Congress. Nothing has been the same ever since.
The 17th Amendment changed one word in the Constitution. It changed the Senate from being an appointed position by the state legislatures to being a position elected by the people as a whole. It was a crazy idea that actually blurred the huge difference between the House and Senate. Now both would be elected by the people.
