Justice Antonin Scalia spoke to a packed Harvard audience last night, where he shared his thoughts on everything from abortions to orgies. At one point, it seems that he even advocated orgies for "relieving tensions" or something like that. The reporting on that point is shoddy, so I'm not real clear what he actually did say.

As interesting as that may sound, though, this must have been, hands down, his best line of the night:

In one of the more bizarre moments of the evening, Scalia mentioned—in passing—that he thought the 17th Amendment was “a bad idea.”

In case you're unaware, the 17th Amendment calls for the popular election of Senators. Prior to its passage, the legislature of each state would elect the state's Senators. There reasons for this are many, but to highlight a few, consider that

1. the House represents the interests people, while the Senate was intended to represent the interests of the state,

2. since the people elect the members of their state legislatures, and those members then in turn choose the person amongst themseleves who is who is most capble, you're ensuring that the Senate is populated with brighter / more informed people.

3. you probably learned in school that Senators get 6 years while House members get only 2 because that way the Senators don't have to play politics, right? Wrong. True, Senators are not supposed to have to play popular politics, because they're supposed to be elected by state legislators, not the people.

Like I said, those are just a few of the many reasons, and I probably didn't do a good job of explaining them in my cursory overview, so maybe this is what you should take away from it: the way it was, pre-17th Amendment was GOOD in theory. It is the right way to do things. The only reason that the 17th Amendment was ratified is because state legislatures proved to be very bad at actually picking a Senator to send to Washington - infighting, political filibusters, etc, would often result in a state's seat going unfilled for months on end, often leaving the Senate without a quorum. The 17th Amendment was enacted to prevent this from happening. At the time, everyone agreed that the people had no business electing Senators, but no one could find a better way.

Which brings us to 2004 - why is the author shocked or puzzled as to why Scalia would speak out against the 17th Amendment? The author does, after all, refer to the moment as "truly bizarre." Now, it's not clear if he calls this a "bizarre moment" because of the statement itself or because of some secondary, unmentioned factor, i.e. perhaps a dancing lizard polka'd on by while Scalia "mentioned" it. My guess, however, is that the author thinks it's bizarre because he simply doesn't understand why voting could ever be a "bad" thing. Unfortunately, we brainwash our kids with this nonsense from their very first day of schooling, so you can't really blame him, We teach them that they live in a "democracy," and that "popular voting makes our nation strong."

Neither sentiment could be further from the truth. The United States is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. We are strong because our federal system is structured such that competing interests are represented and given an appropriate amount of power. "The people" are but one of those interests and should not be overrepresented, lest the whole thing come a-tumblin' down.

I've mentioned my disdain for the 17th amendment in the past. It's something that I've been meaning to write about for a while but just haven't yet had time.

Hopefully I can find time soon. In any event, I'm glad to know that Justice Scalia is on board.