More notably, state legislatures are easier to influence by big lobbying interests (as was clear back when this reform was first put in), and tying US Senators to votes by state legislators suddenly makes gerrymandering a much more powerful political tactic.
Nope. Not a good idea.
Reshared post from +Kee Hinckley
Repeal the 17th amendment and State issues will take a backseat to national ones in State elections.
❝ How do we know repealing the 17th Amendment would turn state legislative elections into proxies for national debates? Because we’ve seen it before. Consider the most famous Senate race in history, when Abraham Lincoln squared off against Stephen Douglas on the question of the expansion of slavery in 1858. We tend to forget, all these years later, that neither man was actually on the ballot. Instead, Illinois voters were choosing Republican or Democratic state legislators, who would, in turn, pick either Lincoln or Douglas. Because the state Legislature had the power to choose the next senator, and because slavery was the burning national question, there was precious little attention for, say, road building or local tax policy or whatever else the Illinois state Legislature had been up to. The only thing that mattered was a national question and the candidates debating it. In effect, in that election, Illinois chose its state lawmakers without paying much attention to the performance of state officials. ❞
Why the Conservative Plan to Get Rid of the 17th Amendment Makes No Sense
Over the past year, an increasingly central plank of conservative and Tea Party rhetoric is that constitutional change is needed and that the 17th Amendment in particular, which gives state residents the power to elect senators directly, should be repealed. (Previously, senators were selected by the state legislatures). Hard-right figures…
I … think I would worry about about maybe looking forward and helping the USA of today, rather than trying to undo stuff that has been on the books for, you know, a century or so.
But I guess if they are going to give up tilting at the Health Care windmill, they have to come up with another bullshit cause to pretend they are doing something.
If I were convinced, +Curt Thompson, that some of the Repeal 17 movement's biggest names were doing so out of a sense of serving the country and improving things and returning to a more pure Constitution and the like, I might give their sincerity a nod even while disagreeing with them. As it is, I strongly suspect that it is primarily about power politics, if not economic warfare.