Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Guest
Come on Jim...you KNOW they're ALL crooked and corrupt. Even the state legislators. If they're in the D or R party...they're corrupt. The party won't put them on the ballot if they haven't pledged allegiance.
|
I'm not saying that it would totally eliminate all corruption, but it would reduce it significantly.
IMHO, and I believe this was the opinion of the founders as well, the larger the population being represented, the less they really know about the candidates. If we're electing someone for the local city council, there's a chance that he might be your next door neighbor and you would know a lot about him. Someone running as a state representative from your town is again, very well known to make of the residents.
A person running for the house of representatives is not as well know by the voters because a district is larger than a city or town, but the founders felt that he was close enough to the electors so that they couldn't easily be fooled. I'm not sure that's the case any longer.
A person running for The United States Senate is only going to be well known to a relatively small percentage of voters in that state. By well known, I don't mean his campaign rhetoric or his stated positions, I mean well known like your neighbors or local merchants. That is why the founders decided that it's a better idea to trust the people that we elect directly, and know very well, to choose who should represent us as a state.
It's also part of the reason for the electoral college. The thing is that we really don't know very much about the people running for president. We only know what the campaigns put out about them, what they promise to do and what their positions on various issues supposedly are. Some may say that we can look at their records. The problem with that is that Congress is so convoluted today that members records are obscured by trickery employed in both houses. Some people have no political record so we really only know what we're told. It's also a lot of work to dig and find out anything about these people.
We elect local people to represent us and we can clearly see what kind of job they do. I would trust these people to elect a senator to represent me more than I would my fellow citizens who have no idea who they are electing.