[sionnsar]

Good arguments are made on both sides. My uneducated comment would be that in order to be elected to the US Senate a candidate must win the favor of residents all across the state - millions in most cases. If the 17th were repealed it would only take manipulation of a small body of elected officials. Those officials normally being concerned with incumbency rather than legality or fairness open the door to all sorts of problems. We see this on a daily basis.

Bay, you are entirely correct and this was, I believe (calling in Publius) the reason the 17th passed.

But there is one element that persuades me towards repealing the 17th, and that is the way the feds control the states through grant monies. They dangle the money, the states take it, and thereafter are hooked -- they have to follow new diktats from DC or risk losing the money they've become accustomed to receiving.

And the new diktats are not harmless; in some cases I've been able to run the numbers to demonstrate that if the state adopted the new requirements it would cost the state more than the amount of lost funding.

I don't like seeing these kind of games. I believe (or at least hope?) giving the state direct representation in the senate would result in fewer such games.