One of the segments kicking off today's Fox News Election Day coverage promoted a curious far-right favorite: repealing the 17th Amendment. This one is especially confusing, because it involves a group purportedly in favor of wresting power from the government and giving it to the people...demanding that power be wrested from the people and given back to the government.

The 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified by states in 1912 and 1913, provides for the direct election of senators by citizens -- previously, senators were chosen by state legislatures. According to FindLaw, a Thomson Reuters reference guide to law, the idea was the result of “increasingly popular dissatisfaction” with indirect election, due to evidence that it led to “deadlocks within legislatures” as well as “the influencing of legislative selection by corrupt political organizations and special interest groups through purchase of legislative seats.”

Obviously, the 17th Amendment didn't solve all our problems with interest group influence. But it did put the power to elect senators in the hands of the populace at large. And you would think this idea -- giving more electoral power, at the federal level, to the average American citizen -- would be celebrated by Fox, whose hosts often use a populist, let's-give-our-country-back-to-the-people rhetoric.

You would be wrong. Fox & Friends hosted Judge Andrew Napolitano this morning to explain why the 17th Amendment is “the only part of the Constitution that is itself unconstitutional.” This is an argument he has pushed before, and one that is increasingly popular on the far right.

Napolitano said he thinks the Founders provided for the election of senators by the state legislatures to “make sure that the Congress wouldn't take power away from the states” and allow states "[to] be a check on the ever-expanding and continuously growing Congress." Then he adds:

But when the Constitution was changed and the people in the states, as opposed to the state legislatures, started sending senators, then they started stealing power from the states, for the Congress, for themselves, and we ended up with this monster government, with the states having very little power left.

Huh? Did Napolitano, on Fox, just argue that the “people...started stealing power from the states” for “themselves”? Is this the same news channel that regularly runs segments about so-called elites stealing power from the American people?

At one point, co-host Brian Kilmeade asks Napolitano the question we're all wondering: “Is it hypocritical to say, Judge, I want part of the Constitution, which they say fuels the [Tea Party] movement, repealed?”

Napolitano: “No, I don't think it's hypocritical at all. I think it shows that people understand the Constitution, and understand how Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives destroyed the concept of state sovereignty.”

Besides the fact that this does sound kind of like, well, hypocrisy, the second assertion is demonstrably not true. As Media Matters for America has previously shown, the 17th Amendment was not some sort of sneak attack by the President -- it was ratified by 37 state legislatures. Also, direct election of senators was already law for either primaries or general elections in 29 states -- of 48 at the time -- in 1912, when the amendment was proposed by Congress.

So, just to recap, Napolitano is telling us:

1) I love the Constitution so much I want to change it, and

2) I love the people so much I want them to have fewer chances to directly elect those who represent them.

It sounds suspiciously like Napolitano wants to protect the people from themselves. Isn't that what the right usually accuses the left of doing?

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