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"Big government" happens to be your choice of words.
In order for you to have greater trust in government than the people, that would mean government would have to be bigger government than the number of citizens.
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Originally Posted by EinsteinsGhost
To allow state governments to "appoint" senators puts more faith in those running the state than in the people to elect who they want to, for the purpose.
Not true at all. By making the appointment at a more local level, they allowed greater control and a much greater watch over those who were being appointed. Furthermore, this appointment limited the size of government because those appointed had to answer to the states and thus things like unfunded mandates couldnt pass. That limited government, not increased it.
In order for you to have greater trust in government than the people, that would mean government would have to be bigger government than the number of citizens.
Senate was originally meant to do just that.
Quote:
Not true at all. By making the appointment at a more local level, they allowed greater control and a much greater watch over those who were being appointed. Furthermore, this appointment limited the size of government because those appointed had to answer to the states and thus things like unfunded mandates couldnt pass. That limited government, not increased it.
What a stupid argument. The members of the Senate are elected by the voters of the states. Consequently, the states have no less power over who gets into the Senate by popular vote than they did when they were elected by state legislatures. It's still a state-level decision.
Maybe you mean that the governments of a state know more than the people of a state.
Yes, now as a majority. Where big metro areas have more say than rural areas. State reps and senators are locally elected and are the voices of small communities.
By making it a majority state wide vote, you take the small rural communities out of the national decisions and make it a lobbying special interest election and the central government gains more power.
Because they wanted each state to have equal power in what goes on in this country. You are saying the sates should have unequal representation according to population.
In their wisdom the founders did not want our supreme court judges to run for office, nor our US senators. I can only guess that they did not want to politicize the US senate nor the SCOTUS. So what is next, we amend the constitution so we can start electing supreme court justices?
I believe that most of our progressives would like to see what you mention for electing Supreme Court justices thinking that the progressive voters would usually bring in more votes. Lets just leave this part of our Checks and Balances controlled as it is.
Direct election of Senators will never go away, ever. Besides, state legislatures usually have the power to elect who they want anyway for Senate, because they draw the district lines to their favor.
Now you have to be aware of the fact that all Senators are voted on by all the voters of the state they come from. There are no district lines involved in the Senate elections. Come on.
You could provide proportional representation or redistrict the states.
The Senate distribution may have made sense in Colonial Times. But in times of 60 to 1 population differences in makes little sense.
The present system says one sixth of the population controls one house of Congress.
We are the "united" states, not a single centralized state. The individual states joined the union under the condition that they could maintain a certain level of equality, and not be rendered insignificant because more populous states could make them irrelevant, and vote them out of existence, so to speak.
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