Just after the 2010 election, Justice Antonin Scalia decided to explain the parts of the Constitution he doesn’t like.

“The 17th Amendment has changed things enormously,” Scalia said. “We changed that in a burst of progressivism in 1913, and you can trace the decline of so-called states’ rights throughout the rest of the twentieth century.”

A sinister “burst of progressivism” is unconstitutional — and so, Andrew Napolitano of Fox News insists, is the 17th Amendment itself, because it was added “at the height of the progressive era, when the government started telling us how to live.”

Today, far-right dogma insists that popular election of senators marked the end of their mythical Great Republic. Former Sen. Zell Miller explained that “instead of senators who thoughtfully make up their own minds, as they did during the Senate’s greatest era of Clay, Webster and Calhoun, we now have many senators who are mere cat’s paws for the special interests.” George Will wrote in a 2009 column that “the Framers established election of senators by state legislators, under which system the nation got the Great Triumvirate — Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John Calhoun — and thrived.”

When the far right says the 17th Amendment harmed “the states,” they mean it harmed state governments. But the state governments are not “the state”; they are simply another institutional player in our complex federal scheme.  The “state,” properly considered, is the people of the state. Who is the best judge of the people’s interests — the state legislative majority or the people themselves?

Properly viewed, governments do not have “rights.” A right is a prerogative that an individual can exercise exactly as he wishes. When you exercise your right to free speech, you can say silly things, or smart ones, or you can just keep your mouth shut. You aren’t accountable to anyone for the decision.

How can a state government have “rights” in this sense?  Should state legislators have the “right” not to approve a budget because they don’t feel like it — or, for that matter, not to elect a Senator because it’s just not convenient this year? State governments, like the federal government, have powers, and they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.  Appropriate state powers are actually protected by the Constitution, and by decisions of the Supreme Court. The federal government can offer incentives to state governments, but it cannot reach down and tell a state legislature what to do. Congress does not send representatives to vote in state legislatures; state governments should have no corresponding right to control Congress.

The popular clamor against the 17th Amendment is worth studying.  It shows that much of the “constitutionalism” being peddled to the people is highly selective, and much of the history that supports it, like Will’s fatuous yearning for the “Great Triumvirate,” is a pseudo-patriotic fable.

The real reason the Scalias, Millers, and Wills of this world favor repeal is simply this: a legislatively appointed Senate could be relied on to block progressive legislation. Left to themselves, those idiot people might have another “burst of progressivism.” Right-wing objections to senatorial election (like so much right-wing “constitutionalism”) are a disguised way of saying they want the Constitution to ensure their side never loses a vote.

To hell with that.