Millions of decent and hard-working people are presently coming to grips what has been happening to them.
What we’ll cover in this post is a crucial and very little-known piece of puzzle.
Here we go.
Notwithstanding its “We the people” opening, it was the states who created the US constitution. It was their representatives that produced it and it was they who ratified it. This was clearly understood at the time and long after.
And, very importantly, the states retained their power under the constitution. I could throw a number of quotes at you to support this, but I’ll give you just one, leading into our main point. It comes from James Madison, the primary author of the constitution, in the Federalist Papers (#39, to be specific). This is Madison explaining the power of the states over the Senate in the new arrangements:
The Senate, on the other hand, will derive its powers from the States, as political and coequal societies…
Notice that Senate got its powers directly and only from the states.
Senators, under the original constitution, were appointed by state governments, not elected by the people. This was a crucial part of the arrangement. In fact…
this was the original separation of powers.
Under this arrangement, the states kept the Senate, with its very broad powers, on a leash.
Again I could throw out quotes on the importance of breaking up power to the framers of the US constitution, but I’ll leave that job to you. I will, however, summarize this point:
The states weren’t given the power to appoint senators so people would be deprived a voice; it was to prevent the consolidation of power in Washington, D.C.
This was a crucial arrangement, and it held until the ratification of the seventeenth amendment in 1913. The arguments for that amendment played upon ignorance and gullibility.
The first argument was that there was corruption involved in appointing senators. It implied that corruption would simply cease once that changed, and that the players in Washington were as pure as the wind-driven snow.
The second argument was that some states hadn’t always appointed senators promptly. It implied that this was a deathly horror.
Nonetheless, people were seduced by the promise of more power in their own hands, and so the amendment was ratified.
And so the states were stripped of power over Washington, D.C. But to whom was that power given?
Voters naively thought the power formerly held by the states would be handed to them, but it was the political class who snatched it up. In fact, they usurped control of the Senate.
People could still vote, of course, but their choice was from then on limited to two carefully chosen alternatives… to carefully curated candidates. Candidates with independent streaks might slip through from time to time, but not nearly enough to threaten the power of the parties.
And to buttress this last point, consider that over the 125 years between the constitution and the 17th Amendment, there had been, minimally, seven major parties in the United States. Over the 110+ years since, there have been only two major parties. Those two have reigned over Washington D.C. for well over a century, and continue to reign.
And, by the way, the framers of the constitution despised the very idea of political parties and made no allowances for them.
This is one of the unspoken facts that lies at the center of US political power. It’s something Americans should be aware of.
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Paul Rosenberg
freemansperspective.com
1913 was a very, very bad year.