[MtnClimber]

I wonder what the founders would think of politics today. I think they would be shocked.

[jimfr]

This article puts forth bold claims but no proof of such claims; as is typical in this particular subject of discussion. To say Senators picked by the state legislatures would be less politically driven than Senators pick by popular votes does not make it so. Knowing human nature, I am sure there were many Senators that were politically driven the first century of this country.
Claiming the states are more able to pick able senators than the people is using the same argument used in this article that Roosevelt used, that our betters (elites) are wiser than the people.

[John Leland 1789]

The Seventeenth Amendment allowed federal senators to ignore the will of their states, made them unanswerable to their state legislatures, and allowed for them to be more loving of lobyists, including foreign interest lobyists.

We want our two senators in Washington to have to come back to the Indiana State Legislature and give public account, under questioning, for the way they vote in the U.S. Senate.

[Carry_Okie]

That the Fourteenth Amendment gave equal protection to corporations goes unmentioned, yet is that which made the Federal government a place for ‘one stop shopping’ and accelerated the concentrated wealth Roosevelts cites.

Further, he misses the equivalent to the Fourteenth in Madison’s original (and rejected) submission for the BOR as an example of the engine of progressivism: the power to enforce equal protection against the States.

So while the author makes a decent case for the catastrophe of progressivism, he misses its nascence. It was always there.

[philman_36]

The easiest way to aggravate a Senator...call them “nothing more than a jumped up Representative”.