OK, here's number 3.

No. 3: Repeal the 17th amendment

In 1913, the very structure of the checks and balances the Founders created for our Federal system was altered, and the result has been a disaster for true democracy. The Founders created a system with both “vertical” and “horizontal” balances. The horizontal ones we all know well: between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches. The vertical ones inhered in our system of Federalism, especially in the balance between the interests of the states as states and the Federal government. The way that balance was insured is that the Founders directed that U.S. Senators be elected by State Houses. And they were—until 1913.

After the Civil War, Congress passed some really bad laws that compromised the workings of the original system, with the result that many people came to believe that the indirect election of the Senate was undemocratic and prone to corruption. But the result of changing the original system is that it has fallen to the Federal courts to preserve the interests of the states, something the Founders clearly never intended.

Worse, severing the sinews of accountability between local and Federal jurisdictions has enabled the vast growth of the Federal government and its bureaucracy at the expense of state policy responsibility. The result has been, in part, the substitution of administrative regulations for actual lawmaking, to the point that those who actually most influence our lives—the “reg” writers in the Federal bureaucracy—are not elected at all.

Ah, once again good intentions paved the road, if not to hell, then to a less democratic result. The direct election of the Senate was supposed to save democracy from the corruption of “smoke-filled rooms”, but the result has been to make the corruption of the Senate easier and more economical at the hands of today’s large corporate lobbies. And is the distance between an average citizen and his or her U.S. senators greater then, or now? Then, a citizen could “get to” a Senator though his or her local state government representative, someone a citizen was and is still far more likely to know and see face-to-face. Now that is essentially impossible for all but a tiny fraction of Americans.

The direct election of the Senate violates the sacred Jeffersonian principle now called subsidiarity—a high-falootin’ word that simply restates the common sense idea that the most efficient and effective solution for any social problem is the one as close to the problem as possible. What neighbors can settle, they should settle. What those in the same congressional district can settle, they should settle, for who knows their interests better than they do? Tip O’Neill was right to say that all politics is local—or should be, to the extent possible. What we’ve done since 1913 is make government more distant from the average person. We’ve made it harder to solve problems where there are most easily, most sensibly and most cost-effectively settled: locally.

This in turn is one of the deepest root causes of our civic participation crisis. Average people feel they have no voice, except to vote once every four years. They don’t see how they can participate in politics in a way that has a bearing on their own daily lives. It’s no wonder most people take no interest in local and state government: It doesn’t do much of anything that really affects them, except provide designer license plates for those who care about such things. 

The result is that what the late Mancur Olson called “the logic of collective action” takes over: Special interests, like developers, who are few in number but who have big and well-focused stakes, win out over the vast majority who have smaller and more diffuse stakes.
Repeal the 17th amendment and all that will start to change. If your State House elected your two U.S. Senators, as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and their colleague intended, you would damn sure take more of an interest in them. So would your neighbors, and then local special interests would not be able to get away with the semi-legal larceny they now practice on a massive scale.

We need to reinvigorate political life in America on the level that makes it real for ordinary citizens. We need to make it possible for people to participate meaningfully in public life. PTAs are great, and so are voluntary neighborhood civic associations. But they’re not enough; that’s not what the Founders had in mind. We need to return the original balance back to our Federal system. We must repeal the 17th amendment. It won’t be as easy as repealing Prohibition, but it’s even more important—and that’s really saying a lot if you happen to like a nice single malt once in a while.