Washington State GOP Backs Repeal Of ‘Defective’ 17th Amendment To The U.S. Constitution Allowing For Direct Election Of Senators

Washington State’s Republican Party approved a resolution calling for the repeal of the 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which allowed for the direct election of U.S. Senators.

The Amendment was ratified on April 8, 1913. It overrode the Constitution’s provision allowing state legislatures to pick U.S. senators. 

The resolution approved at the Washington State GOP convention states that “the Founding Fathers came to a great compromise at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and provided for proportional representation of the people in the House of Representatives of the United States and equal representation for each independent state in the Senate of the United States.”

The document noted that “the selection of the United States Senators by the state legislatures was the political mechanism against congressional encroachment into the sovereignty of the states.”

This document emphasized that “a U.S. Senator’s general responsibility, as intended by the Founders and discussed by James Madison in Federalist Papers, Number 10, was to represent the state legislature as their agent.”

According to this document, every state had been “given the right to prescribe its own procedures regarding the selection process for United States Senators, including appointments in the case of deadlock,” and “the state legislature has a role in compelling accountability from United States Senators.”

It also mentioned that the 17th Amendment’s ratification “changed the selection of the United States Senators from that of being ‘chosen’ by the state legislatures to that of being ‘elected by the people] of the states, thereby divesting the states of any direct voice in the federal government.”

The resolution argues that since this Amendment’s ratification, the “Congress and executive branch have steadily encroached upon the sovereignty of this and the other states united by and under the Constitution of the United States.”

The document also noted that “the existing 17th Amendment relationship between the states and the federal government is guaranteed to further transfer power from state governments to the federal government.”

The declared that “the 17th Amendment process of electing United States Senators by the popular vote to be defective, that it fails to represent the interests of the individual states, and we implore the Congress to propose an amendment pursuant to Article V of the Constitution of the United States to repeal the 17th Amendment in order to restore the states to their prior status as partners in the political process.”

Critics in Washington State and nationwide have pointed to the measure as evidence of further radicalization of the Republican Party at the state level. They point to the Arizona state Supreme Court’s recent ruling reinstating an 1869 total abortion ban as another sign of this trend. Last week, the law was overturned by the state legislature.