The Boy continues his Thoughts as a Dictator

As we were walking back to the house, I continued to tell grandpa my reasons for the changes I’d make as a dictator of this country for a day.

“The 17th amendment like the 16th amendment does not serve the purpose of the intent of representative government as our founding fathers intended. We elect those who are given the power and authority to act on our behalf. Thus, from this it can be declared that anyone not chosen or elected by the people do not represent them. They represent the people who chose or elected them.

Governments are set up to act on the behalf of the state that they govern. The founding fathers set up a government of check and balances. In order for this to happen, each entity of the check and balance system must be viewed in terms of being independent of the other. If there be any dependency it would be that in depending on each other to fulfill their obligations as directed by the Constitution. This would also include the Legislative body of our central government.

In fact, if you look at what the founding fathers were trying to do you’ll see a general principle that they thought should be in place. This general principle being a government that abided by the principle of no taxation without representation. I would not be surprised to hear that it was for this reason that one of the houses is called the House of Representatives.

We must remember that the founding fathers had no intentions on creating the Senate. They had planned to have just a single body to legislate laws. There was one problem with that though. It would create a situation where the people of the most populous states would end up controlling that body. Thus, the Senate was included as a check of that power.

This, then, entailed determining who would select this group of men and since the government of each state was the representative body of that state then that was why it was the governments of each state that selected their representatives to the Senate.

If we look back a bit when we were governed by the old Constitution, the people had no voice in our central government, only the states did. Even then, it was the governments of the states that selected who should be the representatives. We can see the reasoning behind it too. The states were responsible for the funding of the central government. The central government did not have the power and authority to tax the people directly.

Given this added power and authority under the new Constitution necessitated a revamping of the government itself to continue to abide the central principle of no taxation without representation. Thus we have a government where the people have a voice through representation though no direct voice.

With this amendment we still have two houses of legislation but the question is who do these houses represent? To me, both houses represent the interests of the people because the person who is the representative is selected by the people. We no longer have a house to represent the states.

This is important because the Senate has authority and power over many things that the House of Representatives do not possess. These powers would be the responsibility of the governments of the states if the Senate did not exist. As it stands we can declare that those powers and authority would be the responsibility of the people instead of the state governments if we are to abide by the principle of the meaning of representative.”

Grandpa just smiled as I finished and said, “You’re thinking, boy, you’re thinking. I have no gripe with your line of reasoning.”