Of course. After passing the 17th amendment, those rascally popularly elected Senators immediately got into their time machine and traveled backwards in time two years earlier to convince the state-legislative appointed Senators to pass the 16th amendment and enact an income tax! Obviously, due to the fact all state-legislature appointed Senators and infallible and noble politicians committed to the best interests of their states, they NEVER would have DARED enact an income tax if not the evil time-traveling popularly elected Senators from the future making them do so.
Likewise, the passage of the 17th amendment is also directly responsible for World War I, the sinking of the titanic, the trail of tears, the assassination of James A. Garfield, bleeding kansas, Dred Scott, Aaron Burr killing Alexander Hamilton, the stamp act, and of course, the Black Death in medieval Europe.
Never underestimate the evil that the 17th amendment can wrought due to the abilities of popularity elected Senators to time-travel back to events that happened BEFORE the amendment was passed.
Illegals elect and effect Senators today as a result of the 17th Ammendment...
The Census which divides the federal handout pie directly relates to the 'count' which prior to the 17th Senators were not effected by -they could care less about the demands of the mobs in regard to the States they served.
You obviously put a lot of thought into a rather poor argument. A quick check would have let you see that the 16th and 17th amendments were enacted in just a little over two months from each other. And while its stated intent was anything but a federalism argument, its effects on federalism was catastrophic.
Legal expert federal judge Jay Bybee wrote in the Northwestern University Law Review that the Amendment has led to the gradual “slide into ignominy” of state legislatures, with the lack of a state-based check on Congress allowing the Federal government to supersede states.
“Politics, like nature, abhorred a vacuum, so senators felt the pressure to do something, namely enact laws. Once senators were no longer accountable to and constrained by state legislatures, the maximizing function for senators was unrestrained; senators almost always found in their own interest to procure federal legislation, even to the detriment of state control of traditional state functions.”
James Christian Ure, writing in the South Texas Law Review agreed, saying that not only are senators now free to ignore the needs of their state, “they have incentive to use their advice-and-consent powers to install Supreme Court justices who are inclined to increase federal power at the expense of state sovereignty.”
Donald J. Kochan, for an article in the Albany Law Review, analyzed the effect of the Seventeenth Amendment on Supreme Court decisions over the constitutionality of state legislation. He found a “statistically significant difference” in the number of cases holding state legislation unconstitutional before and after the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, with the number of holdings of unconstitutionality increasing sixfold.
So, while the stated purpose of the 17th Amendment was “greater democracy”, its true result is a bloated and overpowering federal government. Not a good bargain.