re: #56 Mostly sane, most of the time.

I got a thing on FB the other day wanting to repeal the 17th amendment. Seriously.

The 17th amendment, for those of you who don’t have this stuff memorized, is Direct Election of Senators. It was passed primarily because someone got himself appointed a Senator by his state legislature by, effectively, buying it.*

It was decided that buying an entire population was harder than buying a legislature.

*In his defense, he said “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.”

It was William Clark, the “Copper King” of Montana, whose buying of state legislators to get himself a seat in the Senate not only contributed to the 17th Amendment, but the creation of the Montana law that SCOTUS just shat on yesterday barring the use of private funds to influence state elections.