“...I’m almost 50, so this has been going on for several decades prior to my birth....”
I am in my mid-eighties and can tell you it has been a political principle for many in Congress since F.D. Roosevelt, maybe before.
We really do need to repeal the 17th and let state legislatures select their own for the US Senate. What we have now is ridiculous. (and obscenely costly)
You know something . . . the Seventeenth Amendment removed the states from the impeachment procedure. So now the trial of any so charged official is in the hands of Senators who are beholden to special interests who are anti-American for the most part.
Of course, the President at the time that amendment was rammed through, Woodrow Wilson, also once wrote that “socialism and democracy are almost, if not quite, one and the same”; so he worked to transform the USA from a republic into a democracy, via that amendment in particular.