The problem is that many State Legislators are corrupt, dumb and retarded. And they keep getting elected and elected.
I’d go back a bit to with one Senator selected by the Legislature and one by popular vote.
Well done. Thanks for posting jfd.
I have advocated the repeal of the 17th Amendment for years.
It was probably a mistake.
But simply allowing a recall vote of a Senator would cure most of the problem, even with popular election.
Now that we have given up the natural born citizen clause without a fight, it’s beyond fixing.
I would not trust state legislatures as they are constructed today to pick a better Senate than we have now. There would be at least as many Swampists, with Senators beholden to other elected officials rather than to the people. In short, the Senate as originally designed was a great idea, but we can’t put the genie back in the bottle now.
Bkmk
Time to repeal it.
Great column.
The 17th Amendment did to federalism what the 13th Amendment did to slavery. Both are long-gone vestiges of our framing era. Tenth Amendment? States’ rights? Poof, and not only long-gone but neither slavery nor federalism can possibly return without repeal of their respective amendments.
Long before Scotus got into the habit of amending the US Constitution, state constitutions, federal and state laws, it was the presence of the states in the senate that kept a lid on, and prevented abuse of, the 14th and 15th amendments. While the 14th Amendment nationalized citizenship and granted congress enormous enforcement power, so long as the senate that had to concur in the actual employment of that enormous power was elected by state legislatures, federalism and the interests of the states as states remained secure.
It is silly to dream of the return of the Framers’ Constitution without repeal of the 17th.
...and only a convention of states can fix it now...
...and most are deathly afraid of that...