Bannon’s war on the corrupt Senate made necessary by the 17th Amendment

Breitbart head and former President Donald Trump strategist Steve Bannon has engaged in a full-scale effort to take out Senate Republicans facing election this year in a bid to purge the fossilized do-nothing obstructionists he believes are standing in Trump’s path.

Bannon’s main target is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. But McConnell is not on the 2018 ballot. So Bannon’s set his sights on lower hanging fruit of swamp-dwelling anti-Trump Republicans like Jeff Flake of Arizona, Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Dean Heller of Nevada. He has stated he plans to fund challenges to every Republican incumbent up for election in 2018 save Ted Cruz of Texas.

But Bannon’s war would not be necessary if not for the passage of the 17^th Amendment. In fact, much of the oppressive statist legislation passed in the last 100 years was made possible because of the 17^th Amendment, which put politicians in the employ of the big corporations and lobbyists from which they got their campaign funds and under-the-table largess.

Under the Founder’s Constitution, senators were beholden to their state and they knew and understood for whom they worked. They served at the pleasure of state legislatures and therefore their first priority was to serve the states that sent them to Washington and preserve their interests.

Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution required that “[t]he Senate or the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislatures thereof…” As such, senators posed a barrier against federal usurpation of states’ rights.

During the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, John Dickinson of Delaware argued “that the members of the second branch (the Senate) ought to be chosen by the individual legislatures.”

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