Last month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell set off waves of indignation among Democrats and reportedly unsettled members of his own party when he announced that he would be working “in total coordination with the White House counsel's office" throughout the Senate impeachment trial process.
All of this is unfolding in an election year, against a backdrop of heavy pessimism about how political pressure will affect individual senators’ votes. No case has yet been presented and no evidence heard, but President Trump’s acquittal by the Senate is widely recognized as a foregone conclusion.
[...]
Alexander Hamilton called it—almost. In his essay “Federalist No. 65,” Hamilton recognized the possibility that the Senate’s judgment in an impeachment trial “will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” He pushed that concern aside, though, and concluded that only the Senate was up to the task of conducting a presidential-impeachment trial with the “requisite neutrality.” No other body was “sufficiently dignified” and “sufficiently independent” to serve as a “fit depositary of this important trust.”
The Atlantic
To be fair to Hamilton, Texas wasn't a state. Nor anything in the South.
So what was Hamilton thinking? If he anticipated that partisanship could undermine the fairness of an impeachment trial, why did he—and the rest of the Founders—ultimately entrust the president’s conviction or acquittal to the Senate?
[...]
The Constitution originally provided for the selection of senators by their state legislatures, a measure that was intended to “keep down the turbulence of democracy,” as the Constitutional Convention delegate Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania put it. But thanks to the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, almost a century and a half after the Founding, senators are now chosen through direct election by the people of their states. This was not a technical tweak but a fundamental design change.
[...]
Consider Hamilton’s claim, in “Federalist No. 65,” that only the Senate “would be likely to feel confidence enough in its own situation, to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality between an individual accused, and the representatives of the people, his accusers.” Specifically, he is asserting that unlike their House counterparts (the “accusers” entrusted to render the equivalent of a presidential indictment), individual senators could be expected to issue fair judgments because their selection by fellow political professionals, for relatively long, six-year terms, insulated them from the vicissitudes and foibles of popular opinion.
Alas, not from the foibles of their own opinions.
In “Federalist No. 64,” to support his argument that senators could safely be vested with the power to approve treaties, John Jay claimed that state legislatures could be expected to appoint “those men only who have become the most distinguished by their abilities and virtue” and “whose reputation for integrity inspires and merits confidence.”
[...]
The French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville famously, and snootily, disdained the “vulgarity and … poverty of talent” of the “obscure individuals” who made up the House of Representatives. “It is said that the representatives of the people do not always know how to write correctly,” Tocqueville scoffed. Yards away, however, was “the door of the Senate, which contains within a small space a large proportion of the celebrated men of America,” whom he praised as “eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose language would at all times do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debates of Europe.”
Like I said, no Texas.
If all this sounds uncomfortably elitist, that’s because it was, at least by modern standards. [...] Elbridge Gerry, later Madison’s vice president, [...] attributed the “excesses of democracy” to the public’s vulnerability to manipulation: “The people do not lack virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.”
Well, that hasn't changed.
It is a bit odd to think that the people could elect Federal House representatives that wouldn't be seen as dignified and educacted, but those same people they elected to their state legislatures were the ones to choose Federal Senators. They - the state legislators - were only once removed from the people at large, and presumably might be "pretended patriots." How were they better than the people themselves able to elect Senators?
This is not to say that the 17th Amendment was a bad idea. It was ratified by the states less than a year after passing the House and Senate, because by then the indirect-election system was an acknowledged mess. Bribery and corruption ran rampant; newspapers decried special interests and wealthy private individuals who bought Senate seats. And when state legislatures deadlocked—as often happened when one party controlled the state assembly or House and another the state Senate—U.S. Senate seats went unfilled, sometimes for years at a time.
[...]
But though the Founders’ preference for indirect election, and their underlying rationale, is out of step with modern thinking, their goal—to engineer a body that would reliably put the public good first—is as relevant as ever. The question is whether, in an era defined by hyperpolarization and partisan acquiescence, that goal continues to inform modern America’s expectations of its legislators—and Congress’s own conception of itself.
Obviously Congress has a completely different conception of itself than the rest of us have of it.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
