You NAILED IT A10. Conservatives OWN the majority of State legislatures. Without the 17th, the Senate would look VASTLY different!
Senators would be beholden to their respective states instead of acting like our rulers!
Given the remote possibility that haven’t seen the excerpt below, you might find it interesting.
One of the reasons that I rant when I hear about the corrupt Senate helping the corrupt House to pass appropriations bills that Congress cannot justify inder its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers is this. A previous generation of state sovereignty-respecting justices had clarified that Congress is prohibited from laying taxes in the name of state power issues.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
So a lot of the federal funding that low-information state lawmakers drool about receiving for their states is arguably state revenues that corrupt Congress has stolen from the states in the form of unconstitutional federal taxes.
So when state lawmakers win federal funding, little do they know that they are arguably recovering stolen state revenues.
And naturally there are always regulatory strings attached to federal funding. This is one way the the corrupt feds unconstitutionally expand their powers imo.
Again, the 17th Amendment needs to disappear.