the Seventeenth Amendment made the USA Senate an elected body, but what if the USA had done what Canada and the UK did, and leave the upper house unelected and cut back it's powers.
the Seventeenth Amendment made the USA Senate an elected body, but what if the USA had done what Canada and the UK did, and leave the upper house unelected and cut back it's powers.
So how are you proposing that the senate be filled? State legislatures still? Governors make apointments? Presidential selections? Hereditary seats? Are senators now for life? And what powers, exactly, does the senate lose, and who takes them (president or house)?
I still think it will just happen at a later date.
It was part of a larger process. By the time the 17th was passed, more states did it then not, so they outnumbered the 'non-elects' hence passing it.
um, there were 8 states that had election pre-1917, the states are Oregon(law changed 1906) elected Class 2 Senator in 1906, Nevada(law changed 1908) elected Class 3 in 1908, Arizona(1911) elected both Senators pending statehood, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota(1912) elected a Class 2, and Maryland(1913) elected a Class 1 special election
Increasingly, Senators were elected based on state referenda, similar to the means developed by Oregon. By 1912, as many as 29 states elected Senators either as nominees of party primaries, or in conjunction with a general election. As representatives of a direct election process, the new Senators supported measures that argued for new legislation, but in order to achieve total election reform, a constitutional amendment was required.
The Congress had resisted proposing the amendment and so the states pushed to take action into their hands. Usually only the Congress proposes amendments, but two thirds of the states can call for a new constitutional convention to propose amendments (in either case, ratification by three-fourths of the states is required for adoption). By 1910, 31 states had called for such a convention (one short of the then-required number), putting additional pressure on the Congress to propose the amendment.[3
It is Wikipedia, but I thought it was true...
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I don't know, the whole reason the Senate exists is because of the whole thing about states having a say, so I don't think you could curtail its powers to terribly much.
More to the point, eliminating the senate would require the senate voting itself out of existence. I'm not sure how plausible this is, especially for senators from under-populated states.
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