I stand corrected.
I guess that I didn't see this. You are making the distinction that the state-at-large as represented by its government, and not the collection of its citizens, has lost the power of voting in the Senate because the legislature lost the right to select their Senators.
You are making the claim that elsewhere in the Constitution when the word "state" is used it is meant to mean the state as a governing body. I agree with this because the 10th amendment says "reserved to the states, or to the people."
Elsewhere in the Constitution, the people and the states are separated, as in the Electoral College (which is also under attack by progressives).
You are saying that the shift of choosing Senators was done without the consent of some states, and that meant that representation of a state-at-large was lost without that state's consent.
That's a deep, and tough, nut to crack. To go there, one would also have to ask if "consent" was given when the states consented to the amendment process in Article V when they ratified it in the first place.
Even if they didn't agree with the outcome, they agreed to an amendment process that allowed for 3/4ths of the states to decide for all. Even if a state came down on the losing side (in this case against ratifying the 17th amendment), they still consented to the ratification process knowing that they will win some and lose some, because it wasn't a unanimous consent ratification process.
-PJ
Yes. In every single case except this one. Remember the amendment process is Article V, and Article V explicitly says "no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate". It is an explicit exception to the majority rules principle.
The nut of the issue is the question of whether we can have an unamendable provision in a constitution. That's the problem the "without its consent" language was supposed to solve. They really did want equal state representation to be set in stone, but as Grotius and many other philosophers have pointed out, there is no way a legislative body can bind its successors.
FYI: The issue of an unamendable constitutional provision came up in earnest during the proposal and ratification process of the Corwin Amendment, which was Lincoln's attempt to lure the Southern states back into the Union by making slavery permanent. He even mentioned it in his first inaugural address.