Bennett doesn't believe the party's rank-and-file members who attend neighborhood mass meetings would vote for a delegate who would then give up that power via changes to GOP party rules. "And I think any legislators" who voted for such a bill may find themselves criticized by rank-and-file Republicans, he said.

"Speaking theoretically," Bennett said, if he were put in a position of being denied the GOP nomination by Republican legislators, he could bypass the Legislature and run a write-in campaign, raise "$2 million or $3 million" from traditional incumbent national sources and win re-election as a Republican.

"I don't think that would ever happen," said Bennett, because he doesn't believe Utah Republicans as a party would ever give up the "great power" of picking their own U.S. Senate candidates.

Stephenson said the Founding Fathers were right in having U.S. senators elected by state legislatures. Adopting the 17th Amendment was one of the biggest governing mistakes the country has ever made, he said.

"It has led to disastrous results — a runaway federal government, budget-busting spending like a drunken sailor, a terrible erosion of states' rights," Stephenson said.

Even if the Utah Republican and Democratic parties won't change their bylaws to give the Legislature some kind of say in U.S. Senate candidates, the second part of the bill, which calls for resolutions by the whole Legislature to give "direction" to Utah's two senators, is valuable, Stephenson said.

Bennett said he has no problem listening to Utah's legislators. But he draws the line on whether legislative "direction" should in any way attempt to control his actions. "If they feel they could control how I would vote, obviously I don't like that," Bennett said.

"The Legislature sent (to Congress) a resolution (last year) on the banks and the credit unions. I listened to it, then I told (state lawmakers) that the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee wouldn't even bring the issue up because he disagreed" with the Utah Legislature's stands, Bennett said. "And that was that."

Bennett said the 17th Amendment passed because Americans were finding two huge problems with legislative-picked U.S. senators:

First, some legislatures — including Utah's — were spending so much time wrangling over who should be a U.S. senator that for periods of time state legislative work was ignored and no one was picked as senator — leaving those states with just one vote in the U.S. Senate.

Secondly, "there was rampant corruption — senators were being picked because they gave $10,000 'contributions' to legislators," Bennett said. "It made what is going on nationally back here (in the U.S. lobbyist corruption scandal) seem very, very minor by comparison."

---

E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com