I rank the 17th as more of an evil than the 16th. Both need to go but the 17th needs to go first.
The trouble is that senators adore it, because it makes them free agents, indifferent to their home state except for every six years when they go there to buy the election.
John McCain is an excellent example. He’s not even an Arizonan, but his wife, the very wealthy beer heiress is, and she will subsidize him any amount of money to keep his seat, so the two of them can live the high life in Washington.
In the last election, he got a serious challenger, former congressman J.D. Hayworth, who was very popular in the state, and it did not matter. McCain spent billions of his wife’s, and Republican “big money”, to utterly ruin Hayworth with mostly slander.
No way in heck he, or senators like him, would vote to return power to their states, because they know they would be pitched out with due haste.
A year ago I proposed a solution to this problem, however, with a constitutional amendment to create a “Second Court of the United States”, ostensibly to reduce the 8,000 a year case bottleneck of the SCOTUS.
But the 2nd court would not be a federal court, but modeled after the original US senate. Two judges appointed by each state, on concurrent terms with their US senator’s terms.
And its purpose would not be constitutional review, which is the job of federal courts, but *jurisdictional* review.
That is, a simple majority of them could say that a federal case taken from a state court, is *not* a federal case, so must be returned to its state of origin for decision. This would strip an enormous amount of judicial power from the federal courts to “federalize” state issues.
The other purpose of the court would be original jurisdiction, to be the first court to hear cases between the states and the federal government. This would mean that as soon as the feds passed some oppressive law, they would be sued and the case heard by a court of the states.