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 Laird
Wilcox, author of The
Watchdogs, a book about contemporary political movements, 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 Wilcox, 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.