Since McCain Feingold, federal legislators have done nothing but fund raise. Their staffs write the legislation, then shift over to the Administrative State to administer the laws they wrote.

I don’t think we could do any worse.

I’m sorry, doc, but the tricorn hat discourse on this issue never impresses me. You can replace the Senate with the original model. What I’ll wager you’ll get is the set of pathologies which induced the public and the politicians of the day (including state legislators) to pass the 17th Amendment. Then as now, constitutional amendments require supermajority. There wasn’t some wire-pulling cabal of ‘Progressives’ who Jedi-mind tricked everyone else. I’ll also wager that you’d replace men who are skilled at running fundraising and publicity campaigns with men who are skilled at building relationships with state legislators. That would be agreeable if it be your object to reduce the influence of big donors, but I’d be surprised if you got more public spirited Senators, or if you got Senators more inclined to provincial autonomy. Alphonse d’Amato was very talented at getting home state pols of both parties in his corner; he’s not otherwise the sort of person you want in any public office. (And I’m putting money on the proposition that mo’ money from the feds is of much greater priority to state legislators than more autonomy; election by state legislators means Cornhusker kickbacks and Louisiana purchases, and not much else).

A bicameral legislature was incorporated into the original constitution in order to reconcile opposed interests among the states. It would be ill-advised to impute any grand principle there. Medieval assemblies were commonly multi-cameral because society was commonly conceived of as composed of orders: clergy, nobility, burgesses, and peasants. That’s never been the case in this country. We did have castes at one point, but the subaltern population was never represented in conciliar bodies. In early America, it was modal for upper chambers to be elected by lower chambers, and to be functionally differentiated from the lower chamber.

The Senate was bastardized by the Progressives. It was designed to represent the states. That’s why each state has two. Popular election of Senators opened the door to the destruction of the federal system, although the Civil War almost did it in. We would do well to go back to the selection by legislatures, as was intended.

I doubt anything will happen until the US splits into red and blue entities. It may happen peacefully, as in Mike Lotus’s book, America 3.0, or violently as in Kurt Schlicter’s novels.

No, they’re not. They’ve been stymied by the electoral college, so they want it out of the way. They’re now stymied by the Senate, so a scatter of them would like the Senate out of the way. Find someone among them who held to that view when Harry Reid was riding high. You’re confusing their improvisations with some principled stand.

(The Senate as is is an awful institution, so replacing it isn’t a disagreeable idea. As for the electoral college, it could use some improvements as well).

Then the author is talking rot. One thing we don’t have is ‘too much democracy’. We have dysfunctional expressions and modes of democracy. The Democratic Party has no interest in democracy per se. Stuff the ballot boxes, rule by judicial ukase, antifa bully boys, lying #metoo smear campaigns. It’s all good so long as Democrats get what they want.

As for France, their public administration is hyper centralized and they have conceded much discretion over policy to drones in Brussels. Their legislative caucuses are composed of deputies who may have a local constituency where they have roots or may have been assigned to that constituency by party barons after an application process. (The same applies in spades in Britain and Canada). ‘Too much democracy’ is not something they suffer. An astonishingly large share of the country’s chief executives the last 50 years have been graduates of just one of their grandes ecole, l’Ecole Nationale d’Administration, which typically has graduating classes numbered in scores. Makes our Harvard / Yale problem look penny ante.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/macrons-warning-to-americas-ascendant-left-1544139254

“Yet peripheral voters still are a substantial minority. And the widespread rioting in France shows the dangers of allowing a healthy dose of democracy to transmogrify into a brutal majoritarianism. Majority rule has its place, but it’s no way to knit together a diverse society.

Those special interests Mr. Macron derided turn out to have provided ballast. A center-right Republican Party under its failed 2017 candidate, François Fillon, would have effected some labor-law and civil-service reforms for which there is now broad support, but that party’s rural base would have precluded the green-energy follies that are sinking Mr. Macron.”

The author points out that too much democracy is precisely what our Democrat coastal elites are pushing for, yet they probably make a serious error in thinking that they can successfully dominate the whole country from the coasts.

I hear you. The thing is, the hypertrophy of higher education has certainly hit Britain big time, and, if I’m not mistaken, France. Your contemporaries and my contemporaries may not have had much post-secondary schooling, but that’s no longer the case.

And you cannot have escalating shares of the population drawing old-age pensions. Something’s gotta give, and when you have increasing life expectancies, the retirement age needs to increase more-or-less pari passu. The last piddling effort in that direction was repealed after public objections. And, if it’s your insistence that when an employer hires someone he cannot discharge that person without running through a cumbersome process, you will have high frictional rates of unemployment. And why is the government the landlord for 17% of the population? Housing will be amply provided by the private sector unless prevented by building restrictions. Housing services are frequently replenished and their consumption is sensitive to considerations of taste and amenity. If you’re concerned about the real incomes of unskilled wage earners, cut them a check in the form of a tax rebate. That has less in the way of administrative costs than does a public housing authority and you get more utility bang for your buck because the recipient will allocate the money according to his preferences rather than the city government’s. Of course, you’ll need to take any residual rent controls off, end the collection of property taxes in poor neighborhoods, and enforce the penal code and the building codes in slum neighborhoods. Ha ha.

Kate: The classic slogan from the French riots in 1968:

Be realistic: demand the impossible

I’m hoping the Yellow Vests are a bit more sensible.

If I recall, it was before Euros as I would probably get that right.