Chris Bray reflects on the 17th amendment to the US Constitution in light of the appointment of California’s new senator:
California Governor Gavin Newsom speaking at the 2019 California Democratic Party State Convention in San Francisco, California on 1 June, 2019.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
… the Senate was supposed to be the national storehouse of wisdom, restraint, discipline, and worldly experience. You may already be seeing that we wandered away from this idea at some point.
The 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, gave voters the power to directly elect senators, reducing the influence of state legislatures and opening the upper house to mass media popularity contests. The 16th Amendment — “Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes” — was ratified the same year, a one-two punch of Progressive centralization of power.
The democratizing and centralizing character of the 17th Amendment gave us a parade of powerful idiots that culminated in John Fetterman, passing through Mazie Hirono and the professional Ted Baxter impersonator Sheldon Whitehouse, so it looks like a failure. But we’ve just run an experiment, thanks to Dianne Feinstein’s white-knuckled grip on her personal status, and the results are … interesting.
The California legislature, in its infinite wisdom, has given the governor the unilateral authority to appoint Feinstein’s replacement, so we’re not quite seeing the exact duplicate of the original constitutional design for the Senate. But we’re seeing something like it: a senator chosen by something other than the popular vote, elevated to the Senate after selection by a longtime state official who has deep personal familiarity with the pool of people who might do the job. You know, a statesman.
Newsom’s choice for Feinstein’s seat is almost miraculous in its awfulness, an appointment distinguished by cravenness and sleazy insiderism. Naming a new senator from a state with 39 million people in it, he has chosen the Maryland resident Laphonza Butler — who has never held any elected office anywhere.
Butler is a career activist and party hack, an SEIU official who went on to run the abortion PAC EMILYs List. She is, in other words, one of the people whose function in life has been to raise money for the Democratic Party. She’s an ATM, and she’s never been anything else. She’s being appointed to the United States Senate without having ever convinced any voters anywhere to elect her to anything, and she’s rising to the upper house of the national legislature with no experience of any kind in any relevant field. Advice and consent on foreign policy? Confirmation of judicial nominees? Well, she has experience raising money for candidates, so. It’s a straight payoff: generate cash for the party for twenty years, get a free high-status ride in the Senate.
Here’s how Newsom explains the choice:
She’s a black lesbian who gives us money, end of statement. California’s idiot politicians find the choice exciting.
