What were they thinking? Long ago, G.K. Chesterton wrote how easily, or with apparent ease, societies discard beneficial practices and institutions without knowing two things. Why was the practice or institution was the way it was, and second, without considering, without reasoning the subsequent effects of change? Nobody has any business destroying an institution until he examines it from a historical perspective.1 Regular readers know my disdain for the 17th Amendment and its awful accumulated consequences. Yes, there was a building consensus in favor of popularly elected senators and in 1913 congress headed off a convention of the states. While...