So, why did we ratify the 17th?

Arguments in favor of the 17th often fall along these lines:

1. The 17th was a necessary and appropriate response to an increasing number of cases in which U.S.
Senators effectively bought their seats through bribes paid to members of state legislatures. This
was an unjust practice that needed to be stopped.
2. Political parties / machines in the several states selected U.S. Senators in reward for work (or
payments to) the parties. This was an unjust practice.
3. Some state legislatures proved either unwilling or unable to elect U.S. Senators, leaving some seats
vacant for months or years - even threatening the quorum in the Senate. Popular election of
Senators ensures that the seats will be filled.
4. The purpose of the 17th is to provide direct representation of the people's will. Citizens are the best
equipped to elect senators.
5. Each state legislature is corrupt (or dysfunctional), and should not have more power than it does.

These are reasonable arguments, but they miss the point. In an attempt to solve very real problems, the
backers of the 17th Amendment (who were in fact the “special interests” of their time) created a new problem
that is far more severe: The fundamental problem with the 17th is that Senators no longer work for or
represent their state governments, and therefore the state governments no longer have a voice or meaningful
political power in the national government. The state governments were the most important check on the
influence and scope of Washington, and without this check, the national government is unresponsive to the
needs of the citizenry.

While the pro-17th arguments noted above are secondary, they still bear addressing.

1. The 17th did not stop corruption or election fraud. Corruption is always wrong, whether it takes
place between a pre-1913 Senate candidate and the legislature that must select him/her, or when a
modern-day Senator accepts “contributions” from “supporters”. By any measure, the 17th was a
poor way to solve the problem of corruption. If anything, it merely pushed the corruption
underground and spread it around. What was once a limited, illegal transaction between one
candidate and the known state legislators is now a problem between one candidate and several
thousand unknown and unknowable funding sources over several tens of thousands of transactions.
Consider this: if the primary purpose of the 17th was to eradicate corruption from Senatorial
selection, it failed brilliantly at doing so. Far too many contemporary examples exist to suggest
otherwise. Corruption will always be a part of politics and must be dealt with aggressively, but
altering the foundational structure of the Constitution in order to wave a hand at corruption was
profoundly misguided.
2. The 17th did not lessen the power of political parties. Political parties have always selected Senate
candidates, and once selected, some other body (legislature or electorate) has had to choose
between them. A state legislature – theoretically – has a party composition that mirrors that of the
state, so without the 17th, party make-up is not likely to be extraordinarily divergent from what the
electorate would select.
3. A state legislature has a political (perhaps even moral) obligation to elect a Senator in a timely
fashion, but it also has an inherent / sovereign right not to. Should a legislature prove unwilling or
unable to fill a vacant Senate seat, this problem is one for the state itself to resolve by a process it
deems most appropriate. To argue that a crisis exists when the U.S. Senate fails to reach a quorum,
one presumes that the federal government's work is critically important, a belief perhaps not shared
by the insufficiently motivated state legislature: the original constitutional structure is designed to
restrict, not facilitate the federal government's acquisition of power.
4. The 17th Amendment violates the principle that entities are represented only once in government
(some call this a variation of "one person / one vote"). Citizens are already represented in the
national legislature by their elected member of the U.S. House. Allowing citizens to vote for their
state's U.S. Senators means that each citizen is represented by three votes (one House and two
Senate). Why? Stating that U.S. citizens are best equipped to vote for U.S. Senators - who should
not represent the citizen's will in the first place - is either wrong on principle or beside the point,
depending on one's view. The will of the people is best expressed through the people's
representatives in the House, but primarily in state and local governments for the simple reason
that their most basic needs are met here and not via the government in Washington.
5. State legislatures, like all human endeavors, are imperfect and corruptible - they are now, and they
were in the 1700s. If a state legislature is found lacking, local citizens are far more likely to correct it
than they are to reform the national government