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The Huffington
Post recently (March 18) sunk to a new low by publishing an attack on “Ron
Paul and the Tea Parties: States’ Rights and the
17th Amendment” by one Leonard Zeskind, a “former”
Stalinist rabble-rouser. According to the Wilcox Collection on Contemporary
Political Movements at the University of Kansas’
Spencer Research Library, Zeskind began his communistic career of agitprop in
the ’70s as
a “front
man” for
the “Sojourner
Truth Organization” whose stated objective was “to
motivate the working classes to make a revolution.” The
Organization quoted its role model, Josef Stalin, who insisted on the need
for “iron
discipline” in
agitating for a communist revolution in America.
According to the
Wilcox Collection, Zeskind has written favorably about “the
value of a grass roots school of communism” that
would teach people how to “destroy the
marketplace.” He
wrote this in a journal called “Urgent Tasks,” a
phrase popularized by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Kansas City City Magazine
once called Zeskind “elusive,
paranoid, near hysterical.” His forte,
according to the Wilcox Collection, appears to be “ritual
defamation” of
his perceived political opponents, i.e., “to
call people names in the hope of defaming, discrediting, stigmatizing or
neutralizing them.”
An example of the
Zeskind/Huffington “ritual defamation”
strategy is his statements in The Huffington Post that: 1) Someone
writing for an obscure publication called “The
American Free Press” noted recently
that “the
Tea Parties were actually born during the presidential campaign of Rep. Ron
Paul of Texas”; 2) Several decades ago, someone who
wrote in “The
American Free Press” was revealed to
be a Holocaust Denier; 3) Therefore, the Tea Parties (and Ron Paul’s supporters)
must be hotbeds of Holocaust Denial.
Zeskind works
himself into a hysterical frenzy over the fact that the “Tea
Party Movement” has been talking about repealing the
Seventeenth Amendment, which he says would be the equivalent of denying women
the right to vote, or abolishing the constitutional principle of equal
justice under the law. I’m not making this
up. He really is that hysterical. And he calls Ron Paul an “extremist”!
Apparently,
Ariana Huffington believes Zeskind is a qualified expert on constitutionalism.
Why are the
Huffingtonians upset about mere talk of repealing the Seventeenth Amendment?
Because the Amendment, which mandated the popular election of U.S. Senators
(as opposed to the original system of appointment by state legislators) allows
a small cabal of wealthy and influential people to dominate governmental
decision-making. Getting elected to the U.S. Senate requires the raising of
millions of dollars for television advertising and other elements of modern
campaigning, so that senators have long been in the pockets of their major
donors from all over the country, and the world, as opposed to the folks back
home. Zeskind says this system is “democratic,” but
in reality it is the opposite. Reverting back to the original system that was
created by the founders would allow the “riff-raff” known
as the citizens of the sovereign states to exert more influence over their
own government. Historically, this system was an important brake on the
growth of the central government. This is why the Lunatic Left is
increasingly hysterical over the talk about repealing the Seventeenth
Amendment as well as nullification, and especially secession.
The Rationale for
State Legislators To Appoint U.S. Senators
Professor Ralph
Rossum of Claremont McKenna College explains the rationale for the original
system of appointing U.S. Senators in his book, Federalism, the Supreme Court, and the
Seventeenth Amendment. The
founding fathers intended that state legislatures would appoint senators and
then instruct them on how to vote in Congress. This was to safeguard against
the corruption of senators by special interests. “The
ability of state legislatures to instruct senators was mentioned frequently
during the Constitutional Convention and the state ratifying conventions and
was always assumed to exist,” writes Rossum.
At the New York
ratifying convention John Jay, co-author of The Federalist Papers, said
“The
Senate is to be composed of men appointed by the state legislatures…. I
presume they will also instruct them, that there will be a constant
correspondence between the senators and the state executives.” At
the Massachusetts ratifying convention Fisher Ames referred to U.S. senators
as “ambassadors
of the states.” James Madison wrote in Federalist #45
that because of this system the U.S. Senate “would
be disinclined to invade the rights of the individual States, or the
prerogatives of their governments.” This was an
important element of the whole system of states’
rights or federalism that was created by the founders (not by John C.
Calhoun, as Zeskind and myriad neocons falsely claim). As Madison wrote in Federalist
#62, the system gave “to state
governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government as must
secure the authority of the former.” It helped
establish the fact that the citizens of the states were sovereign and the
masters, not the servants, of their own government.
The legislative
appointment of U.S. senators was responsible for the most famous declarations
of the states’ rights philosophy of the founders, the
nullification philosophy as expressed in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves
of 1798, authored by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison respectively (not by
Calhoun, as Zeskind and others falsely claim). These Resolves were used as
part of the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures’
instructions to their senators to vote to repeal the odious Sedition Act,
which effectively prohibited free political speech. The origins of
nullification do not lie in attempts to protect slavery or Jim Crow
laws, as Zeskind once again falsely claims. Jim Crow laws existed throughout
the Northern states for many decades before they were imposed on the
South by the Republican Party’s military
occupation authorities during Reconstruction.
John Quincy Adams
resigned from the Senate in 1809 because he disagreed with the Massachusetts
state legislature’s instructions to him to oppose President
James Madison’s trade embargo. Senator David Stone of North
Carolina resigned in 1814 after his state legislature disapproved of his
collaboration with the New England Federalists on several legislative issues.
Senator Peleg Sprague of Maine resigned in 1835 after opposing his state
legislatures’
instructions to oppose the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United
States. When the U.S. Senate censured President Andrew Jackson for having
vetoed the rechartering of the Bank, seven U.S. Senators resigned rather than
carry out their state legislatures’ instructions to
vote to have Jackson’s censure
expunged. One of them was Senator John Tyler of Virginia, who would become
President of the United States in 1841.
In other words,
the original system of state legislative appointment of U.S. Senators did
exactly what it was designed to do: limit the tyrannical proclivities of the
central government. As Professor Todd Zywicki of George Mason University Law
School has written, “the Senate played
an active role in preserving the sovereignty and independent sphere of action
of state governments” in the
pre-Seventeenth Amendment era prior to 1913. “Rather
than delegating lawmaking authority to Washington, state legislators insisted
on keeping authority close to home…. As a result,
the long-term size of the federal government remained fairly stable and
relatively small during the pre-Seventeenth-Amendment era” (emphasis
added). (See Todd J. Zywicki, “Beyond the Shell
and Husk of History: The History of the Seventeenth Amendment and its
Implications for Current Reform Proposals,” Cleveland
State Law Review, vol. 45, 1997).
You know the
Lunatic Left is whistling past the graveyard when they resort to the “might-makes-right”
argument against nullification and repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment.
Echoing the views expressed by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia several
weeks ago, Zeskind concludes his paranoid tirade by saying that the “vision
of state sovereignty and secession were settled by the Civil War….” But
nothing is ever “settled”
permanently in politics, no matter how many citizens the U.S. government
might murder (some 350,000 in the case of the “Civil
War”) in
order to prove itself “right.”
Thomas DiLorenzo
Thomas
J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about
Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His
latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed
the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.
Article
originally published on www.Mises.org. By
authorization of the author
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