If people think repealing the 17th amendment will solve anything, they only need look at the recent record of lame dumbass corrupt liberal nobodies who got appointed last term in the Senate to be proved wrong. We had 6 of them and if *any* of them were in the top half of ‘good senators’ I didnt notice.
They were dregs.
Burris in Illinois - a left liberal Obama rubber stamp, Blago appointed and a joke
Bennett in Co - appointed, now elected. What’s the difference.
Some left-liberal nobody from Delaware.
In Florida, Charlie Crist’s right hand man. Strong conservative? NOT! Marco Rubio is so much better ... yet Marco would not have been Senator under appointment system.
There you go. Repeal the 17th amendment and you’ll get the same group of smug political elitists, except it will be HARDER to get rid ofthem because they will be indirectly and not directly accountable to voters.
You’re citing Senators appointed by governors on the death of a sitting senator...not selected by state legislatures as per pre-17th Amendment guidelines.
Of course, states like CA would appoint idiots like we have now Boxer and Feinstein. However, we turned 680 seats in the states in one election, the legislature is a far easier target than getting to pick the millionaires that buy the Senate seats. You can unseat a local pretty easily, but unseating a Senator requires huge sums of money.
Good point. The idea that state legislatures would magically become something they haven't been in generations if they had the power to choose Senators doesn't hold much water.
The Amendment went through because if the Senate weren't popularly elected it would lose power, as all legislatures that aren't popularly elected have done in the last 200 years.
The Senate would have become merely a formality, a rubber stamp, and power would have passed to the House, which could claim with more accuracy to represent "the people."
I generally agree with the characterization of these six Senators as dregs, but disagree with you on two points.
The first point is that these dregs were appointed as placeholders. The governors who appointed them (at least in the case of Florida and West Virginia) didn't want a strong Senator who could challenge them for the seat during the regular election.
The second point is that these folks, as I mentioned earlier, were appointed by Governors....not by the State Legislatures. I think you may be mixing apples and oranges on this one.