Congressional Pork and the 16th Amendment

Instapundit posted an interesting reader response today on the subject of Congress' two-party addiction to legislative pork:

WHAT TO DO? Democratic reader Fred Lapides emails:

I have seen you (and of course others) sturggle mightily and willingly and idealistically against the rampant pork madness in our congress. And I have seen you now, same day, badmouth Pelosi and Murtha and then, later Trent Lott...all for the same issue.

What is to be done?

What we have is legislators who get and gain and keep power by handouts; and what we also see is that this is the way of the congressional world. Libertarians and/or any other party will not change things, it seems, and the American public know only to change elected officials or parties when they get upset, though when pork comes to voter districts, those voters are hardly going to rebuke the elected officials who got the pork.

Read the rest here.

Lapides is right, of course, and Instapundit Glenn Reynolds himself opines that this might be getting him interested in term limits again.

But I'm surprised at Glenn's response. After all, he's an attorney, and ought to know the simple answer. The Congressional pig trough started with the astonishingly simple 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which, along with the 17th, passed in the same year (1913) directly led to today's disgusting pork distribution system, not to mention the IRS, our ridiculously coercive tax system, etc.

The 16th Amendment is short and sweet and to the point:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

Hey, there's carte blanche for ya. When the Amendment was ratified by the states, American incomes instantly were subject to whatever Federal taxation the Congress would choose to impose on them. With the 16th Amendment came the institutionalization of Federal pork, the ne plus ultra of political entitlements, at least for incumbents. With a single bell-clear sentence, Congress appropriated for itself a huge smorgasbord of spending opportunities that have spiraled forever upwards. In point of fact, if this amendment were ever repealed, the Feds would have to go on a serious diet. And each session of the Congress would last, oh, about a month or two, since there wouldn't be much pork to spread around. And without Congress in session for much of the year, their power to make mischief would be severely curtailed.

Wonker's thought about this for well nigh 30 years, but every time he brings it up in public, he's pronounced certifiably daft by folks on both sides of the aisle. But in point of fact, where in the Sam Hill does all that pork come from today? It comes from we the people, it's forked over to corrupt career politicians to distribute freely to their friends to buy re-election, and it was all made perfectly respectable by the 16th Amendment. Rarely was the answer to a complex question so simple, and we're surprised neither Glenn nor his reader thought of it.

In all candor, given how far things have gone today, I'm not sure exactly what we'd replace the 16th Amendment with. After all, the country does need at least a bit of revenue, if for no other reason than to keep pilotless drones flying over Taliban heads. But the unending stream of our own purloined wealth, sloshing through the sluicegates of Congress and away again to the undeserving would come to a very abrupt end indeed if the bipartisan Fools on the Hill no longer could depend on that handy 16th Amendment. Something to think about, eh? Bet you never did.
Oh, yeah, we mentioned the 17th. That's more complicated, so we'll just footnote it here, more or less. But it's related in a general way to what we just discussed. It's a little longer than the 16th, but its first sentence will suffice for our purposes:

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote.

What, you say? Wasn't this always in the Constitution? The election of Senators? Nope, it wasn't. Senators were appointed by sitting Governors up to this point, which was Federalism in action, giving Governors the enormous power to influence the composition of the upper house. In a way, this hearkened back to the House of Lords in Parliament. In the American democratic experiment, however, the Senate's "Lords," while appointed, were appointed by a duly elected representative of the people (in this case, each State's elected Governor), so their staggered appointments were roughly reflective of the amount of state houses x or y party held when each series of 6-year senatorial terms came up.

Now think about this. If that were the case today, conservative Republicans would have run the Senate for far more years than they have in actuality since the end of World War II. In recent years, in particular, Republicans have dominated our state houses, and would thus have appointed, at times, veto-proof majorities to the upper house rather than the constant thin, directly elected majorities we've been saddled with today. This would have led to either party's having the ability, for better or for ill, to ram their own programs through the upper house without a great deal of opposition, given the vagaries of gubernatorial elections. And, of course, quickly face the music for their actions via the statehouses.

But by eliminating this last bit of apparent patricianism in 1913, the 17th Amendment ended up having an unintentionally disastrous effect. Since governorships tend to turn over from party to party more frequently than gerrymandered House seats and national party-supported Senate seats, we would be seeing a far greater turnover in an appointed upper house than we do with today's elective Senators—if the 17th Amendment hadn't passed. This would have made it far more difficult for Senators to gain the kind of lifelong tenure that makes it easy to dispense pork. (And it would, on another front, have made it far easier over the last 30 years, for a Republican-dominated Senate to install a thoroughly conservative Federal bench as well.) Maybe that's why Congress, early in the last century, managed to get these Amendments through, because they understood full well the fiscal considerations potentially denied to them by continuing the Governor-dominated system.

Of course, in the end, it all goes back to the 16th Amendment. Elected or appointed, it's tough to dispense pork and buy votes if you don't have much pork to distribute. The 16th Amendment granted Congress a neverending pot of gold, and we've been suffering the consequences ever since.

This is a perfect Libertarian argument for repealing the 16th. I'm surprised I never hear from them on it. Maybe no one knows civics anymore. Which gets us to the public school system. Which will at some point be the subject of its own serious HazZzMat rant.

Don't you feel a lot smarter now?