If most states are anti-Obamacare, why did they elect pro-Obamacare senators?

Gintas writes:

One thing that puzzles me about states threatening to sue over the health care bill is: with more than 37 state legislatures mulling over the problem, aren’t many of these the same states sending representatives to Washington, D.C., and passing the thing in the first place?

LA replies:

You’re thinking about the way things were under the original U.S. Constitution, when senators were elected by their respective state legislatures rather than by the people of their state, as became the case under the 17th Amendment. Under the older system, it was understood that a senator represented the interests of his state as a state, and as expressed by the state legislature of that state which had elected him. Under the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, the senator gets elected by promising to satisfy the desires of the people, mainly, nowadays, their desire for federal largesse, making senators indistinguishable from congressmen. This is an argument to repeal the Amendment and return to the original manner of choosing senators and the original multi-layered stucture of the Constitution, with the people being directly represented in the House of Representatives, and the states (with their concern for preserving state prerogatives from federal intrusion) being represented in the Senate.

Gintas replies:

The pre-17th Amendment situation occurred to me, but the same people who voted for the senators also voted for the state legislatures.

Can a state recall its senators or representatives from Congress?

LA replies:

At the time of the Nov. 2008 election, no one had heard of individual mandates, let alone of the use of budget reconciliation and the self-executing rule for passing revolutionary legislation. The people thought they were voting for Democrats, not Deemin’-crats.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 18, 2010 05:59 PM | Send