Blaze Media by Robert Curry September 28, 2023
Virginia Allen of the Heritage Foundation recently interviewed Joseph Postell, an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College, about Congress and its history. Allen asked a question that goes to the heart of the Founders’ design: “Now, when the Founders were crafting Congress, why did they see a need for two separate entities, to have a House and a Senate?”
“Yeah, it’s a great question, and it’s really the most important question,” Postell replied. “All these other questions are more technical and procedural. But I think the question you’re asking really gets at the most significant thing about Congress ...”
“So they actually deliberately made Congress weak by dividing it up into these two bodies,” he explained.
Much of what the professor tells us, however, invites a very different answer.
First, there is the significance of the word “Congress.” Here is the first definition of that word in my dictionary: “A formal assembly of representatives, as of various nations, to discuss problems.” The Congress of Vienna is a famous example. It was a series of meetings between representatives of the nations of Europe to try to work out a new European political order after the defeat of Napoleon. It was not called the Parliament of Vienna because it was not a legislative body but an assembly of representatives.
And neither was America’s Continental Congress. As Postell notes, the Continental Congress predated the Constitution. Representatives of the 13 former colonies met to work out how they could win their independence from the British Empire. It is often said that the Continental Congress was politically weak. All that really means is that it was not a legislative body. The states retained their sovereignty, and the representatives of the states met together to discuss the challenges the states needed to face together.
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The American state governments were to be represented in the Senate — the federal legislative house of the state governments — and you and the people in your locality were to be represented in the House of Representatives — the federal legislative house of the people. The states and the people would each have a representative body in the federal legislature.
But in 1913, the American people broke the founding bargain, setting in motion the ongoing process of progressively overthrowing the Constitution, which is the source of the mess we find ourselves in today.
The 17th Amendment was the single change that did the most to undo what the Founders had accomplished by means of the Constitution. It provided for the direct election of senators, the system we have now. The state governments would no longer control the Senate through the representatives they chose. The state governments’ base of political power within the federal government was taken from them, putting an end to the federal system of the Founders.
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