Although I would support the repeal of 17A just to help reconnect patriots with the Constitution and its history, 17A is not the problem with the unconstitutionally big federal government imo. The problem is that constitutionally ignorant voters don't understand that most of the spending programs that candidates promise to get themselves elected as federal lawmakers are based on constitutionally nonexistent federal powers.
In fact, what you're not going to hear from Obama guard dog Fx News is the following. Practically the only federal program that Congress has the power to regulate, tax and spend for within state borders is the postal service as evidenced by the Constitution's Clause 7 of Section 8 of Article I. In other words, federal government has no power to tax and spend for most other government services within state borders.
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." --Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
The 17th fundamentally altered the structure of our government. The division of power between the federal government and states was destroyed. Without the institutional means to secure their interests, to enforce the 10th, to keep the feds to enumerated powers, it was only a matter of time before James Madison's prediction was fulfilled; we have a consolidate government of plenary powers. The 17th is the reason we have runaway government.
More importantly, what they don't understand is that the money being spent belonged to the states. Now it is taken at the federal level via the 16th amendment and spent there or doled back to the states with strings attached.
What if the states never gave that money to the federal government, and instead spent it locally via state legislative authorization? Roads and bridges would get fixed. Jobs would grow locally. It would vary by state based on each state's needs.
Instead, the federal government taxes the money away from state use and then gives it to Egypt and Syria, spends it on failed alternative energy programs, or pays illegal aliens to reside here with food stamps.
Return control of the Senate back to the states, and then give the states a say in how much money is taken from them and how it is spent.
-PJ