Article Five of the Constitution contains two things the founders said could never be amended. The second one reads: no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate. Constitutional scholar Bill Norton pulls out his Constitution and reads it aloud, then makes the argument that has followed him for thirty-five years — that the Seventeenth Amendment could not lawfully have been ratified by three quarters of the states, because it required all of them.
The standard answer is that no state lost anything, since every state still seats two senators. Norton's response is that the Constitution is careful with its language. When it means the citizens, it says "the people of the several states." When it says "no state," it means the state as a governing body — the legislature. And the legislature is exactly what the Seventeenth Amendment stripped of its voice in the Senate.
He is candid that he sits in the minority on this reading, and that the argument would take a state willing to bring it. He names Utah and Vermont as two he is certain did not ratify.
This is the bonus conversation following Lesson 3 of the founding-principles training on the U.S. Constitution with Jenny Beth Martin.
Get the free founding-principles training at teapartypatriots.org/1776. Full episodes at jennybethshow.com. More from Tea Party Patriots Action at teapartypatriots.org.
00:00 — Why This Amendment Needed a Different Path
00:17 — The Two Things Article Five Says You Cannot Amend
01:34 — No State Shall Be Deprived of Its Equal Suffrage
02:23 — What "No State" Means: The Legislature, Not the People
03:18 — Why He Is in the Minority on This Reading
04:20 — Taking It to the Supreme Court
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