Late last week, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who is currently campaigning for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ), told a Republican gathering in Payson, Arizona that he supports abolishing the Seventeenth Amendment’s guarantee that voters elect their own senators. Prior to the Seventeenth Amendment’s ratification, the Constitution provided for senators to be selected by state legislatures, a system that was abandoned after it led to “rampant and blatant corruption, letting corporations and other moneyed interests effectively buy U.S. Senators.”

Flake, however, is not alone in his desire to make America less democratic. Indeed, at least two other GOP senate candidates, one GOP governor, one Republican senator and a Supreme Court justice all have indicated agreement with Flake’s ambition to return the Constitution to the halcyon days of the Nineteenth Century:

• Indiana Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock: Mourdock, who defeated incumbent Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) in a GOP primary after campaigning on a platform of refusing to compromise with Democrats, suggested at a campaign event last February that senate elections should be abolished because “the House of Representatives was there to represent the people. The Senate was there to represent the states.”
• Missouri Senate Candidate Rep. Todd Akin: Akin, the GOP nominee facing incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), said during a GOP primary debate last may that “I don’t think the federal government should be doing a whole lot of things that it’s doing and it well may be that a repeal of the 17th Amendment might tend to pull that back.”
• Texas Gov. Rick Perry: Perry’s star has fallen considerably since his “oops” of a presidential campaign. Nevertheless, he remains the governor of America’s second largest state. He also believes that “The American people mistakenly empowered the federal government during a fit of populist rage in the early twentieth century by giving it an unlimited source of income (the Sixteenth Amendment) and by changing the way senators are elected (the Seventeenth Amendment).”
• Sen. Mike Lee: Lee believes that federal child labor laws, FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, Medicaid, income assistance for the poor, Medicare and Social Security violate the Constitution, so it is not surprising that he is also a seventeenther. Lee explained his opposition to his own election to the United States Senate in an interview with Fox Business.
• Justice Antonin Scalia: Scalia, who was widely criticized for his partisan rhetoric during the Supreme Court’s recent health care and immigration cases, also called for the Constitution to be changed to abolish senate elections — “I would change it back to what [the founders] wrote, in some respects. The 17th Amendment has changed things enormously.”

A new web video by Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R), the Republican nominee for Sen. Dick Lugar’s now-open Senate seat this November, is yet another indication of just how wrong the assumptions underling Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Citizens United majority opinion were. In it the 5-4 majority agreed that “The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy. By definition, an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.”

Already, “independent” Super PACs have been hiring the same political consulting firms as the candidates they are supporting. Already, the Romney campaign has enlisted Karl Rove, the co-founder of two of the largest pro-Romney outside groups, to participate in a strategy retreat with top-level campaign donors and bundlers. Both are apparently-legal moves that fly in the face of the spirit of non-coordination rules.

Now, Mourdock’s campaign is apparently using yet another loophole. Since the campaign made not directly work with allied “outside” groups, it has posted a four-minutes-and-36-seconds-long video of footage of the candidate online, just in case any outside groups happen to want to use it.

The National Journal describes the video, titled “Indiana Footage,” as “essentially a soundless highlight reel of high-quality, uplifting footage of Mourdock shaking hands with voters, speaking, and driving.”

Watch the spot:

Mourdock’s primary win relied heavily on outside spending. This video is either one of the most boring political ads of all time or a not-so-subtle request to well-heeled outside groups to invest more for the November general election.

Indiana U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, the Tea Party candidate who proclaimed that “bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view” shortly after defeating longtime incumbent Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), does not think he should be elected to the U.S. Senate. Indeed, he believes that it should be unconstitutional for anyone to run for the Senate. At a campaign event last February, the Tea Party candidate came out against the Seventeenth Amendment, which ensures that senators will be chosen by elections and not by state legislatures:

You know the issue of the 17th amendment is so troubling to me, our founding fathers, again those geniuses, made the point that the House of Representatives was there to represent the people. The Senate was there to represent the states. In other words the government of the states. . . . You know I think most senators if they had to come back every two years and by the way that would solve another problem. It would solve the idea that Senators move out of their state and never return. But it would cause those senators to have much greater contact with their states. You know just think of this. In today’s you see millions and millions of dollars spent on Senate campaigns. Two years ago, in 2010, Sharon Angle out in Nevada spent 31 million dollars, just herself. How much money would be spent in federal senate races if the state legislators were electing those people. You just took the money out of politics. Is that a bad thing?

Watch it:

Mourdock is certainly right that eliminating U.S. Senate elections would end the practice of corporations and wealthy individuals throwing millions of dollars to change the result of those elections. Indeed, under Mourdock’s logic there’s no reason to stop there. If we simply named someone the hereditary monarch of the United States — King Mitt I — then no one would ever spend money to influence an American election again!

Mourdock is dead wrong, however, to suggest that ending Senate elections would eliminate corruption. Rather, one of the primary forces driving the Seventeenth Amendment’s ratification was the fact that the old system led to a kind of Citizens United on steroids:

[T]he system led to rampant and blatant corruption, letting corporations and other moneyed interests effectively buy U.S. Senators, and tied state legislatures up in numerous, lengthy deadlocks over whom to send to Washington, leaving those bodies with far less time to devote to the job of enacting the laws their states needed for the welfare of the people.

Sadly, Mourdock is not the first major Republican to say that the American people should not be allowed to elect their own senators. Texas Gov. Rick Perry believes this, as does Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Justice Antonin Scalia.

In 2009, when President Obama was close to the height of his popularity and political capital, only nine Republican senators voted to confirm Justice Sotomayor: Lamar Alexander, Kit Bond, Susan Collins, Lindsay Graham, Judd Gregg, Dick Lugar, Mel Martinez, Olympia Snowe, and George Voinovich. Of these four (Bond, Gregg, Martinez and Voinovich) are now retired. One (Snowe) recently announced her voluntary retirement. And one, Dick Lugar of Indiana, was just involuntarily retired by Tea Party challenger Richard Mourdock.

Lugar is an Indiana institution. He ran virtually unopposed during his last reelection race, and won by more than 30 points the last time a major party candidate tried to challenge him. Had he won yesterday’s primary, he would have been the prohibitive favorite in November (Mourdock, by contrast, could lose in November as easily as he could win). Nor was Lugar particularly moderate. Among other things, Lugar voted for Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) infamous plan to phase out Medicare.

In the age of the Tea Party, however, even the most occasional departures from conservative orthodoxy are enough for the GOP electorate to declare a public official an apostate. Mourdock made Lugar’s votes for Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, in addition to a handful of other breaks with America’s far right, the focus of his campaign — and that was enough to defeat a 36 year Senate veteran. In light of this incident, it is unlikely that any of the few remaining Republicans who backed an Obama Supreme Court appointee will be willing to risk their careers by doing the same again.

Lest there be any doubt, there is probably no one President Obama could nominate for the high Court who would satisfy the newly radicalized Republican Party. Mourdock, for his part, recently promised to oppose any nominee who did not fit his personal constitutional philosophy — and he twice cited failed Supreme Court nominee and Romney legal advisor Robert Bork as his model nominee. As recently as last October, Bork mocked the very idea that women sometimes face discrimination as “silly,” and he infamously described the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters as “unsurpassed ugliness” early in his career. Obama would never, ever nominate such a man to the Supreme Court.

In other words, if President Obama has the opportunity to nominate a new justice during a second presidential term, it is tough to imagine any set of circumstances that allows that nominee to receive the 60 votes necessary to break a filibuster. The parties are too far apart. The Republicans are too eager to obstruct, and the handful of GOPers with a history of bipartisanship will be too spooked to reach across the aisle. America could go years with one or more Supreme Court seats vacant.

There could be, however, a way out of this trap. In his most recent State of the Union Address, President Obama called on the Senate to “pass a simple rule that all judicial and public servant nominations receive an up or down vote within 90 days” — effectively eliminating the filibuster for Senate-confirmed jobs. Moreover, when the newly-elected Senate reconvenes next January, it opens a very brief window where Obama’s proposed rule could be implemented with just 51 votes.

Should the Democrats manage to hold the Senate next year, an outcome that is much more likely than appeared possible just one year ago, they no longer have the option to maintain the status quo. Keeping the current rules means stripping Obama of his power to nominate Supreme Court justices, and potentially turning the Court over to Mourdock’s fellow ideologues for years to come.