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With the power of recall, the voters can easily nullify any candidate advanced by their legislators, and they can apply for preemptive recall on a list of candidates in preparation for an actual recall vote. They do this by simply gathering signatures on recall petitions with names inserted and announcing they are ready to go forward.

No legislator is going to vote for a candidate they know will be recalled on day one of their appointment.

Prior to the 17th Amendment, there were show elections or show votes of US Senators by the electorate in much the same way that presidential elections are show votes because the President is not elected by popular vote, and for good reason, but rather by the Electoral College.

These show elections for US Senators were never binding. The straw that broke for the 17th was not some ‘sacred’ right to vote by the electorate but rather the chaos reported among newly forming western states, especially as some states refused to even seat their US Senators leaving the US Senate an incomplete body. All that was needed was time and patience but a populist uprising later taken up by the US Senate itself forged through the issue of a binding popular vote for US Senators. This was a mistake in 1913, as were the 16th and 18th Amendments. Some call this era of US history the beginning of the Progressive Era but it is more aptly described as the Era of Recklessness as these 1913 amendments were all poorly conceived and considered.

Research of periodicals of the time reveals the invention and growth of radio and telephone had a great deal to do with the agitation of the population to fixate over these poorly thought-out amendments. Many US historians and scholars of the time tried to warn of the folly of these amendments but the new means of communication allowed people to think they had found a better way.

Tearing down the state’s ability to elect its own representatives to the US Senate via the 17th Amendment violated the principle of decentralization that is essential to a Republic. Yes, there was statehouse corruption and yes, there were sellouts, but not on a scale that warranted wrecking the US Constitution’s structure for a Republic. As it is now, a US Senator is nothing more than an ‘Uber’ Congressman or Congresswoman. There is no need for a US Senate that is elected by popular vote. The House suffices for representing voters. The design for states to be represented was demolished by the 17th. To refer to a US Senator as the Senator from ‘ZZ’ is a farce. Today, that US Senator is the Senator from Alcoa, from IBM, from Dupont ...

What happened after 1913 was a gradual and near complete centralization of all power in Washington DC with a ‘fog of distance’ separating citizens from their US Senators. It was far better to have a local government, the statehouse, act as a known local body that could control its US Senators. The voters certainly can’t organize effectively to throw out an incumbent in the US Senate although they may try but almost with certainty fail because too many persons and businesses are made dependent on the incumbent or the incoming opposition is aligned by the same interests who control both parties.

Roy Moore is an exception, not a rule. If the Alabama statehouse was considering appointing Strange as its US Senator, it is a near certainty that the 28h Amendment above would have Alabama’s voters with a recall application ready to go so that Strange would never be seated. That is the power of recall. Alabama’s legislators would quickly know who was favored by Alabama’s voters just as the pre-1913 show elections indicated who was preferred, only the pre-1913 voters did not have the power of recall. The 17th Amendment should have been the granting of the power of recall and term limits but no doubt the JP Morgans of the time saw the 17th popular vote as a means to grab power in Congress because voters would be given a choice of ‘R’ or ‘D’ and both of the choices would be backed by monetary powers.

Controlling interests care not for ‘R’ or ‘D’, they care only that control is absolute, and if not, they will back an opponent they select. These powerful interests may lose on occasion but statistically, they win. It is never completely left to the voters to decide, there is no truly populist candidate running for US Senator, at least not in reality. Sessions, as a US Senator had a populist following with a belief in his patriotism and some of it, was true as long as it was not at odds with those that controlled him. And he was indeed controlled as a US Senator on issues of importance to those that could make or break him.

Each US Senator is controlled by special interests. There are no independent free thinkers in the US Senate. The 17th was used to evolve a structure that allowed this control of US Senators. Should one US Senator fall out of favor or become unpopular to the point of not being able to sink his opponent through smear, innuendo, entrapment, then his/her opponent would become owned/backed or a replacement would emerge. This was the dynamic during the pre-1913 era as well but the difference was that the controllers were provincial and not national or international in origin.

The point is the voters have no real power other than to vote for one of the two-party candidates put before them like a menu at a restaurant, both prepared by the same group of chefs. Nor do the voters really know who they are voting for as all the candidates are completely scripted or should be or eventually will be if they are to survive. The only way a voter can know their US Senator is by observing the fruits but even in this, there are shell games as mentioned above with reference to parliamentary tricks.

The only way the voters can hold their US Senators accountable is through the power of recall, the power to ‘fire’ the Senator. An effective way to impede and stifle the tendency for wealthy interests to exert control of the US Senate is to set term limits and the only way to deconstruct and decentralize the massive Administrative State that evolved from the 17th is to repeal the 17th.