My family likes Mitt Romney, in particular the ones that are Democrats and don’t live in Utah. To me, Mitt is the prime example of why the seventeenth amendment was a mistake. In Utah, Mitt is well liked by Democrats, as is Jon Huntsman, liked so well, in fact, that hundreds changed party in order to vote in the primary election to get them on the Republican ballot. Mitt, for those that don’t know, is a Republican Senator who was elected to represent the state government of Utah. That is his singular objective. 

In the constitution before amended, Utah would have appointed a person to represent the legislature and governor by some mechanism that the state, not the federal government, had chosen. To be clear, the US senator was to represent the needs of the state government in a union of state governments (y’know, just like the name says.) In the current version, he represents himself. It is almost certain that a supermajority of the state legislature disapproves of many of his high profile votes. This means that he frequently votes against the institution he was elected to represent. Mr. Romney fails to represent his state. That’s his only job and he can’t do it.

This is what happens when senators are elected by a popular vote. They do not differ from representatives, except they have a longer term. There were problems with the Senate before the seventeenth amendment. We’ve only acquired different problems, ones that erode the basic structure set out in 1786. Arguably, it has added to the strain on our Union currently. Given diversities in many dimensions and planes and given that humans are not angels, there is no perfect system of government. It is also possible that the best form of governance varies according to the culture of those governed. For the people that loved liberty and freedom so much that they or their predecessors fled monarchies in Europe, the best structure seemed to be ours in its original basic structure as it balanced the needs of the people and the needs of state governments with the needs of the union of state governments, aka the federal government. (This explains in part why the states, not the people, elect the president.)

Mr. Romney is a good man, a popular guy, handsome, clean-cut, erudite, successful, wealthy and talented. However, he is unfaithful. He, not a Utahn, philandered to a state with a populace that would elect him, but, it turns out, not a state to which he could be true. He has long focused on the lengthy list of sins of Mr. Trump but cannot see his own political promiscuity. He repeatedly argued and voted to rid the country and the republican party of a man who, despite his flagrant flaws, did a hundred times more to advance conservative ideals than Mr. Romney ever could, ideals that Mr. Romney claims to support during his campaigns, and aspirations that dominate the state government. A man with no flaws has very few virtues, Lincoln said about his choice of generals, but he could have been speaking about Romney and Trump as well.

Lack of fidelity to party is, at most, a peccadillo. Making the state government you were elected to represent a cuckold is unforgivable.