The much much more important distinction between the Senate and House than the manner of election was that each state has the same number of Senators regardless of population.
The people of each state are “the state” as much as the state government they elect. No need for a middle man unless you think the career politicians that run state legislatures are our betters.
Anyway, the most important point his that this scheme is a fantasy with zero chance of ever happening and if our side actually made it a major campaign issue it would be extremely unpopular wedge issue.
I agree. The main point of having two houses of Congress was that one body represented population interests, and the other body represented geographic interests (2 senators per state, regardless of how many people lived there).
Since these anti-17thers think state legislatures are soooo wonderful, maybe they could focus more effort on bringing back the system "the founders" used for the federal legislature to determine the makeup of state legislatures. The Illinois State Senate would be a hell of a lot less corrupt if Crook County got only 1 Senator out of 102, instead of 35 out of 59 like they have now.
The reason why we ended up with one elected house and one appointed house in the federal government wasn't because the founders all got together and realized that this brilliant system would ensure proper balance in our Republic and blah blah blah. Some of the founders felt the legislators should be all elected, some of them thought they should all be appointed, and neither side could get a majority of votes, so they compromised and came up with a 50/50 system that nobody was pleased with but they could all live with (the 3/5th compromise happened the same way... slave owners wanted slaves to be counted as regular parts of their population so they'd get lots more influence in the federal government, abolitionists didn't want slaves counted as all since the slave owners treated them like property and gave them NO rights in those states, so they compromised and decided each slave would be counted as "3/5th" of a person. That didn't make it an all-wise, all-knowing divine decree that nations that currently have slavery should emulate)
The way some of these anti-17thers talk about "the Founders" and "the Republic", I wonder if they passed Political Science 101 in college or a H.S. level government class. They certainly would have failed my senior year of H.S. government class if they wrote that a Republic is "a nation governed by the rule of law that guarantees the rights of individuals" rather than the correct definition, a sovereign self-governing nation without a king or royalty as head of state.
Reminds of liberals arrogantly going around saying that you "hate science and are too stupid to understand it" if don't agree with them about global warming, when they're the ones who can't understand basic scientific facts about embryonic and non-embryonic stem cell research (gosh, you mean we can get stem cells WITHOUT using embryos? I never knew that!)