April 8, 2010: Fox Legal Analyst Says 17th Amendment Must Be Repealed

Former federal judge Andrew P. Napolitano, a Fox News legal analyst since 1998, says in an interview with the right-libertarian magazine Reason that the 17th Amendment must be repealed. “Can an amendment to the Constitution itself be unconstitutional?” he asks the interviewer, and answers himself: “Yes, that one. If you read [Foundng Father James] Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention, they spent more time arguing over the make-up of the federal government and they came up with the federal table. There would be three entities at the federal table. There would be the nation as a nation, there would be the people, and there would be the states. The nation as a nation is the president, the people is the House of Representatives, and the states is the Senate, because states sent senators. Not the people in the states, but the state government. When the progressives, in the Theodore Roosevelt/Woodrow Wilson era, abolished this it abolished bicameralism, the notion of two houses. It effectively just gave us another house like the House of Representatives where they didn’t have to run as frequently, and the states lost their place at the federal table. That was an assault, an invasion on the infrastructure of constitutional government. Even kings in Europe had to satisfy the princes and barons around them. And that’s how they lost their power, or that’s how their power was tempered. Congress believes it doesn’t have to satisfy anybody. Its only recognized restraint is whatever it can get away with.” Napolitano also promotes the idea of nullification to expand states’ rights at the expense of the federal government (see October 14, 2010 and March 23, 2011). [Reason, 4/8/2010] The 17th Amendment provides for the direct election of US senators, rather than their selection by state legislators, in part to eliminate cronyism and corruption in their ascension to the US Capitol. It was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913. Recently, far-right Republicans and tea party activists have begun calling for its repeal, joined by some members of Congress. [Media Matters, 9/7/2010; Legal Information Institute, 2011] Napolitano has previously advocated repealing the 16th Amendment (see April 28, 2009). In 2009, former Republican Governor Mike Huckabee called the 17th Amendment “one of the dumbest things we ever did in this country” (see October 16, 2009).