Witness what happened to legislation to allow Congress to audit Federal Reserve transactions more than 6 months old – Seeing as how the Fed now has unsupervised power to print and issue as many dollars to whoever they like, it seems reasonable for Congress to be able to look at the Fed's books at transactions that are six months old, huh?

The bill had over 290 congressional sponsors, but it was stymied in Congress by the Obama administration, then killed in the Senate by the Frank/Dodd over-regulation act.

Makes you wonder, as Goldman Sachs donated nearly a million $ to the Obama campaign, and Frank & Dodd are both members of Obama's party, and who knows how many other lawmakers got money from the banksters?

If the Senators had been appointed by the states, we probably would have been looking at the Fed's books by now. Repeal the tenth and seventeenth! Audit the Fed! Above all, Ron Paul in 2012!

1. With no statewide campaigns, the cost of choosing senators would drop to nearly zero.

2. When senators were appointed by the legislatures, they were totally accountable to those legislatures, who could remove them from office at any time. Compare that to the extreme difficulty of recalling a corrupt or rogue elected senator.

3. In states with one big city, that city often outvotes the rest of the state (think NYC, Chicago, Detroit or Omaha). So whoever carries the city generally carries the state in an at-large election. Without the 17th, a wannabe senator would have to appeal to the entire legislature, not just big-city voters. IMHO, under such a system the NY legislature would never have appointed Hillary and the Illinois legislature would never have appointed Obama. (Feel free to think up your own examples.)

Other amendments worthy of repeal are the 23rd (those living in the District of Corruption should vote absentee in their home states, as military personnel do) and the 24th (only taxpayers should be allowed to vote, as per John Stuart Mill).

Reform efforts began as early as 1826, when direct election was first proposed. In the 1870s, voters sent a petition to the House of Representatives for popular election. From 1893 to 1902, the popularity of this idea increased considerably. Each year during that period, a constitutional amendment to elect Senators by popular vote was proposed in Congress, but the Senate resisted greatly. In the mid-1890s, the Populist Party incorporated the direct election of Senators into its platform, although neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party paid much notice at the time. Direct election was also part of the Wisconsin Idea championed by the Republican progressive Robert M. La Follette, Sr. and the Nebraskan Republican reformer George W. Norris. In the early 1900s, Oregon pioneered direct election of Senators, and it experimented with different measures over several years until success in 1907. Soon thereafter, Nebraska followed suit, and it laid the foundation for other states to adopt measures for direct election of Senators.

After the turn of the century, support of Senatorial election reform grew rapidly. William Randolph Hearst expanded his publishing empire with Cosmopolitan, which became a respected general-interest magazine at that time, and which championed the cause of direct election with muckraking articles and strong advocacy of reform. Hearst hired a veteran reporter, David Graham Phillips, who wrote scathing pieces on Senators, portraying them as corrupt pawns of industrialists and financiers. The pieces became a series titled "The Treason of the Senate," which appeared in several monthly issues of the magazine in 1906.[2]

Increasingly, Senators were elected based on state referenda, similar to the means developed by Oregon. By 1912, as many as 29 states elected Senators either as nominees of party primaries, or in conjunction with a general election. As representatives of a direct election process, the new Senators supported measures that argued for new legislation, but in order to achieve total election reform, a constitutional amendment was required.

The Congress had resisted proposing the amendment and so the states pushed to take action into their hands. Usually only the Congress proposes amendments, but two thirds of the states can call for a new constitutional convention to propose amendments (in either case, ratification by three-fourths of the states is required for adoption). By 1910, 31 states had called for such a convention (one short of the then-required number), putting additional pressure on the Congress to propose the amendment.[3]

Consequently, in 1911, Senator Joseph L. Bristow from Kansas offered a resolution, proposing an amendment. The notion enjoyed strong support from Senator William Borah of Idaho, himself a product of direct election. Eight Southern Senators and all of the Republican Senators from New England, New York and Pennsylvania opposed Bristow's resolution. Nevertheless, the Senate approved the resolution largely because of the Senators who had been elected by state-initiated reforms, many of whom were serving their first terms, and therefore were more willing to support direct election. After the Senate passed the amendment resolution, the measure moved to the House of Representatives.

The House initially had fared no better than the Senate in its early discussions of the proposed amendment. During the summer of 1912, the House finally passed the amendment and sent it to the States for ratification. The campaign for public support was aided by Senators such as Senator Borah and the political scientist George H. Haynes, whose scholarly work on the Senate contributed to passage of the amendment.[1]

On April 8, 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment was adopted, upon its ratification by Connecticut, a year and a half prior to the 1914 Senate election.

HISTORY FROM WIKIPEDIA:

Originally, each Senator was to be elected by his state legislature to represent his state, providing one of the many American governmental checks and balances. The delegates to the Convention also expected a Senator elected by his state's legislature would be able to concentrate on the governmental business at hand without direct, immediate pressure from the populace of his state, also aided by a longer term of six years than the two year term afforded to members of the House of Representatives.

This process worked without major problems through the mid-1850s, when the American Civil War was in the offing. Because of increasing partisanship and strife, many state legislatures failed to elect Senators for prolonged periods. For example, in Indiana the conflict between Democrats in the southern half of the state and the emerging Republican Party in the northern half prevented a Senate election for two years. That partisanship led to contentious battles in the legislatures, as the struggle to elect Senators reflected the increasing regional tensions in the lead up to the Civil War.

After the Civil War, the problems multiplied. In one case in the mid-1860s, the election of Senator John P. Stockton from New Jersey was contested on the grounds that he had been elected by a plurality rather than a majority in the state legislature. Stockton defended himself on the grounds that the exact method for elections was murky and varied from state to state. To keep this from happening again, the Congress passed a law in 1866 regulating how and when Senators were to be elected from each state. This was the first change in the process of senatorial elections. While the law helped, there were still deadlocks in some legislatures and accusations of bribery, corruption, and suspicious dealings in some elections. Nine bribery cases were brought before the Senate between 1866 and 1906, and 45 deadlocks occurred in 20 states between 1891 and 1905, resulting in numerous delays in seating Senators. Beginning in 1899, Delaware did not send a senator to Washington for four years.