The Bastard Amendment
The 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution is a wholly invalid bastard which does not belong, the very idea is repugnant to virtually every major tenet of contract law, and it is the ultimate root cause of so many other serious problems.
The Founding Fathers and the original Constitution as enacted had it right the first time. Federal Senators are, yes, of course, and with very good reasoning, actually supposed to be "career politicians" by and large. That part is not in any dispute....
But how they get to finally become Senators within our federal Congress is most certainly in dispute, because the current system not only egregiously interferes in Senators properly doing their jobs, but it also directly violates various checks and balances, and inherently invites malfeasance and corruption to grow and fester.
Shockingly passed by a clearly corrupt Congress on May 13, 1912, and ratified on April 8, 1913, after what must have been a very serious misinformation campaign, the 17th Amendment replaced Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution by allowing voters to cast votes directly for U.S. Senators. Prior to this change, Senators were always, throughout history, each individually chosen by their own state legislature.
Final 1913 implementation of the bastard 17th Amendment was just one part of the overall "Three-Headed Snake" package, along with the 1913 Federal Reserve Act (unlawfully enacted "in the dead of night" by less than a valid number of Congress) and the 1913 federal Income Tax Act, all in timely conjunction with nearly all of the world's industrialized nations "coincidentally" also all taking themselves off of the Gold Standard during 1913-1914, in order to convert most of our world's gold and silver backed currencies into a vast global slush fund of "fiat money" currencies, i.e., baseless print-more-on-demand currencies, just in time for all the major powers on both/all sides of World War I to each get their own staggering, incredibly massive "loans" to pay for the tens of billions of bullets plus all of the other many munitions, equipment and sheer manpower (very large, historic sizes of new armies) that they needed for a truly global war of immense proportion with equally vast devastation.
By slashing the gold backing of our currency down to just 40%, these "loans" were basically free to them at that original time, designed via the conversion of our gold backed money into fiat currency as an evil means to rob future generations of their wealth by neverending devaluation of fiat currency via inflation. Sure, don't get me wrong, as there actually are, in fact, sound economic principles which fairly support maintaining a very small (1% to 2%) inflation rate. But that can achieved by other means, instead of bald criminal conversion of our sound and stable bullion-backed currency into an essentially worthless and volatile fiat money. No nation on this Earth could have even remotely afforded to actually fund their own participation in such a juggernaut global war like World War I or World War II, without the ability of the nation being able to "borrow" against the future taxes of its own citizens via the devices of inflation overseen by a federalized central banking system, which system and governors are also magically somehow effectively "above the law" and virtually not subject at all to any meaningful form of transparency or accountability.... Gee, what another purely random coincidence that unusual setup must surely be, right??
President Andrew Jackson, a common man of the people, and an anti-establishment type boldly blazing trails for future similar Presidents such as Kennedy, Reagan, and Trump, aggressively took on the whole notion of America having a centralized bank, shutting down the Second National Bank, in what is now known as The Bank War, because Jackson understood this insidious evil upon the everyday citizen, declaring during a public speech that the same Bank was "unauthorized by the Constitution, subversive to the rights of States, and dangerous to the liberties of the people."
Some say the real reason Kennedy was assassinated was because he was privately planning to put America back onto the Gold Standard, and that the suddenly brand new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, after boarding the airplane with Kennedy's body, was threatened with the same result if he had any ideas about returning to the Gold Standard. Some say the real reason behind the public impeachment threat to Nixon over Watergate was not actually just about Watergate itself, but was really more in regards to vague and questionable theories about Nixon and the Gold Standard.
But I digress..., sincere apologies, as this webpage's lesson is supposed to focus on just the 17th Amendment itself, not really go on about the whole "new world order" substitution of most currencies around the globe with fiat money during 1913-1914.
The truly evil, bastard 17th Amendment fundamentally transformed America forever, and wrongly so, in one fell swoop. Throughout America's first 125 years, in order to become one of the only two federal Senators from any given State, you had to win a very special and very limited type of election -- you had to win over your well-known opposition candidate(s) in an election for votes from amongst only the members of your own state legislature. This well-designed framework by the Founding Fathers kept everything in good balance and well "checked" (i.e., "constitutional checks and balances") by inherently leashing the permanent and primary interests and therefore the elected candidate's votes actually cast within the federal Senate body to be very, very strongly aligned with the will of the people of just that one single State, hence automatically kept federal Senators generally honest and true in casting their votes in said alignment with both the general people and state legislators back home, or else either the state legislature would simply give that prestigious power to somebody else next time around, and/or the general populace, being outraged enough, would compel those state legislatures to still have to pick somebody new, or else face their very own losses of state political power and prestige. Either way, this original framework kept most things fairly well maintained and reasonably true to the Founders' intent for the people's checks and balances upon the Congress, still allowing for the need of "career politicians" in the Senate for the longer-term needs of America, like maintaining ever-present memories and knowledge regarding the ongoing histories of the relationships with both allies and foes, while the direct elections of federal House Representatives obviously constitute both the direct will of and direct implementation by the people in constitutional checks upon the various Members of that side of our federal Congress.
Senators have six-year terms. Under the original, far better framework, Senators did not have to "campaign" much at all, and what little and brief "campaigning" was done was primarily amongst their own state legislature, since the voters themselves did not directly decide their election. "Lobbying" the U.S. Senate (i.e., bribing Senators) was inherently prohibitive, because you would literally need to "lobby" (bribe) more than half of the members of multiple state legislatures, i.e., a prohibitive number of bribes. And your own State's citizenry were well served under the original framework, since a Senator's vote could not easily be "overrun" or homogenized or otherwise tainted by any competing interests of any other State(s). The original framework provided solid checks and balances that were automatically inherent via that well-designed system.
But after the 17th Amendment, whereby Senators are directly elected by the general voting public, each Senator must now spend much of their 5th and 6th years (of their six-year term) running their general re-election campaigns to the public at large, and so now Senators are consuming up to a quarter of their six-year term just running for re-election again, and that's a gigantic waste of time and resources, taxpayer dollars, legislative work opportunity, and more. Worse yet, votes by Senators are often now influenced by interests from other States instead of their own home State interests, by seeking and accepting donations from outside of their own State (which under the original framework, would be a highly suspect behavior in the eyes of one's own state legislators...). And in the age of electronic connections, communications, and news, these influence-tainting factors have been exacerbated to the point where now each Senator effectively is forced to campaign not only to win his/her own State's citizenry and businesses, but basically the entire nation has become their campaign boundary.
Far worse yet, the 17th Amendment literally opened the floodgates to exponentially increase bribery (ah-em, "lobbying") of our Congress, by the Establishment players in ever-increasing fashion, usually opposing and subverting the desire, will and needs (and often also the rights...) of the everyday regular people. And since there are now tens of thousands of registered and unregistered lobbyists focused upon our federal Congress (not counting yet many more at the state and local levels), and corporations average $760 back from the government for every dollar spent lobbying, there are so many lobbyists lining up that every Senator literally has a jam-packed full-time job in just scheduling the endless stream of bribes being offered non-stop for their votes.
Further details with links to relevant law and more coming soon....
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