RSS Feed
News
Doc of the Day: The 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
04/08/10
The Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, providing for the direct election of U.S. Senators, was ratified on April 8, 1913. Before that time, senators were chosen by state legislatures rather than elected by popular vote.
The original method of filling seats in the U.S. Senate appears in Article 1, Section 3 of the Constitution, which says that “the Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, chosen by the legislature thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote.” In practice, however, this system made it easy for powerful political, financial, and business interests in the state to control the choice of senators for their own benefit.
In the early 1900s, a number of prominent members of the Senate came under investigation and were convicted of fraud and other crimes. Muckraking journalists such as David Graham Phillips, whose nine-part series “The Treason of the Senate” appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1906, exposed many instances of Senate corruption. Progressive leaders seized upon the public outrage that accompanied these revelations to push through a series of constitutional reforms that sought to make the government more democratic. After the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, American voters elected senators directly in the following year’s elections.
Read THE SEVENTEENTH AMENDMENT TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION