🏛️ The Constitution and the 17th Amendment
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Special edition

🏛️ The Constitution and the 17th Amendment: History, Federalism and the Debate Today

How the framers gave Senate elections to the state legislatures, how that system worked and broke down through deadlocks, empty seats and bribery scandals, how the Progressive reform movement and the Oregon System forced the Seventeenth Amendment through in 1913, what the amendment's text and the courts say about vacancies, Idaho's own history with it, the full scholarly debate over what direct election did to federalism, and the repeal and reform proposals still argued today.

10 lessons · about 10 hours ·

Start lesson 1

  1. 1The Original Design: Why the Framers Gave Senate Elections to the State LegislaturesArticle I, Section 3 as written in 1787; the Virginia Plan, the June 7 vote for election by state legislatures, the Connecticut Compromise and the August votes on terms, qualifications and vacancies, all verified in Madison's notes; what the Federalist and the Anti-Federalists said about a Senate chosen by the states; and the related rules of equal suffrage, six-year terms, rotation and the original vacancy clause.55 min
  2. 2How Legislatures Elected Senators, 1789 to 1866: Joint Ballots, Instructions, Contests and the Act of 1866How the system worked in practice for its first 77 years: concurrent votes versus joint ballots, the state rules, legislatures instructing their senators and the resignations that followed, the Senate judging its own elections from Gallatin in 1794 through Indiana in 1857, the New Jersey Stockton case of 1866, and the Act of July 25, 1866 (14 Stat. 243) that imposed one procedure on every state, what it required and what it left unfixed.55 min
  3. 3Deadlocks, Vacancies and Scandals, 1866 to 1912: What Went Wrong with Legislative ElectionThe system's breakdown in the forty years after the 1866 Act: Haynes's count of 46 deadlocks in 20 states from 1891 to 1905 and the Senate Historical Office's figures; Delaware's seats left empty for years; the 1899 Montana election of William A. Clark and the Senate committee's unanimous 1900 report against him; the Lorimer case from his 1909 election to the 55 to 28 vote of July 13, 1912; the bribery record and the Millionaires' Club charge; Bryce's description; the newspaper campaigns; and what the deadlocks cost states in representation and money.60 min
  4. 4The Reform Movement: Populists, Progressives, the Oregon System and the Race RiderHow the demand for direct election grew from an 1826 House resolution into the People's Party platform of 1892, five House-passed amendments the Senate refused to vote on, the Oregon System that let voters bind their legislators, the state petitions for an Article V convention, the arguments of George Frisbie Hoar and the Senate's defenders, and the 1911 fight between Senators Sutherland and Bristow over whether Congress would keep its power over Senate elections.55 min
  5. 5Passage and Ratification: 1911 to 1913, State by StateThe Senate's two votes of 1911, the ten-month conference, the House's vote of May 13, 1912 to accept the Senate's version, the enrolled joint resolution at 37 Stat. 646, the ratification race from Massachusetts on May 22, 1912 to Connecticut on April 8, 1913, the states that rejected or never acted, Secretary of State Bryan's proclamation of May 31, 1913, the first direct elections, and Idaho's ratification on January 31, 1913 by a legislature that had just spent ten days deadlocked over a Senate seat.55 min
  6. 6The Text and the Courts: Three Paragraphs, Four Cases and Fifty Vacancy LawsThe Seventeenth Amendment clause by clause: popular election, the qualification clause tied to the most numerous branch, the mandatory writ of election, the proviso allowing temporary appointments, and the savings clause. Then the cases that have construed the vacancy clause, Valenti v. Rockefeller (1968, affirmed 1969), Rodriguez v. Popular Democratic Party (1982), Trinsey v. Pennsylvania (1991) and Judge v. Quinn (2010), the appointment controversies of 2009, and a verified table of how all fifty states fill a Senate vacancy today.60 min
  7. 7Idaho and the Seventeenth Amendment: Legislative Elections, One Contested Seat, Four Deadlocks and a 1917 StatuteIdaho's Senate elections by the legislature from statehood in December 1890 to the thirty-first ballot of January 1913: Shoup, McConnell and Dubois and the Clagett contest the Senate decided in 1892, Shoup's fifty-two-ballot re-election of 1895, Heitfeld's three-week fusion fight of 1897, Borah's election of 1907, Heyburn's and Borah's opposite votes in the 1911 Senate fight, Perky's appointment and Brady's ten-day deadlock, Idaho's ratification on January 31, 1913, the first direct election in 1914, the 1917 vacancy statute still in force as Idaho Code 59-910, the seven appointments on the Senate's list plus Gooding's 1921 appointment that the list omits, and what this course searched for and did not find: an Idaho preference primary law, the ratification roll calls, and any Idaho repeal memorial.60 min
  8. 8Federalism: The Case That It Changed EverythingThe scholarly argument that direct election of senators broke the Constitution's main structural protection for the states: who makes it (Zywicki, Bybee, Rossum, Amar, Hoebeke), the mechanisms they name, the Supreme Court's swing from Wechsler's political safeguards and Garcia to the anti-commandeering cases, and the federal spending and grant figures from the OMB historical tables.60 min
  9. 9Federalism: The Case That It Changed LittleThe counter-evidence: how indirect election really worked according to Schiller and Stewart's roll-call data, what Crook and Hibbing, Bernhard and Sala, Meinke, and Gailmard and Jenkins measured before and after 1913, why the Oregon System had already handed the choice to voters, what wars, the New Deal and the Commerce Clause explain about federal growth, what the Senate still does for the states, and a scorecard of every claimed effect.60 min
  10. 10Repeal, Reform and the Debate TodayRepeal proposals since the 1990s and who made them, the state resolutions that passed and failed (Utah 2016, Texas 2011, Montana 2025) and the states that ratified late (Alabama 2002, Delaware 2010, Maryland 2012), the reform ideas short of repeal, the Article V arithmetic and the polling, what repeal would and would not do with today's parties and money, the strongest case on each side, and the course's figures: a timeline from 1787, ratification dates, deadlocks by state and year, and Senate appointments by decade.65 min