By Peter Burrows elburropete@gmail.com 3/30/15

The Founding Fathers had a deep distrust of democracy. They thought democracy inevitably led to mob rule and dictatorship. They constructed our Constitution with safeguards to prevent this, first by establishing a representative democracy, or republic.

Recognizing that even a republic is vulnerable to emotional tides that can sweep away the rights of citizens, they built in other constitutional safeguards, the primary one being a system of dual governments, state and federal, with each jealously guarding its Constitutional sphere of authority from the other.

To further dilute the power of the madding crowd, each state, regardless of territorial size or population, was given equal representation in the Senate, through which all legislation must pass. Hence, scrawny New Mexico has as many senators as brawny California. To a lesser extent, this is also true of the Electoral College, where each state's vote is the total of its number in the House of Representatives plus its two senators.

What is usually forgotten is that only men could vote until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. Some point to that moment as the beginning of the end of the noble American experiment: A country "of the people, by the people and for the people." True, the federal government began its huge expansion about then, but the driving force was the New Deal program to fight the Depression, not legislation to appease women voters.

Far more destructive to our republic was the Seventeenth Amendment, passed in 1913, that mandated members of the Senate be elected by popular vote. Prior to that, Senators had been appointed by each state's legislators, sort of republicanism squared. Now, both the House AND the Senate are filled with career politicians, whose number one priority is getting reelected,