“Using smoky back room machine polotics to select Senatorial candidates was certainly bad.”
O.K. I’ll bite. Why was it “bad”? Who did they end up representing? Industries or interests that States found important? Evil captalists? What?
I think it was supposed to be the “Rich” and industrious. They would “protect” everyone’s right to individual property by selfishly protecting their own. The House was there to protect US against THEM.
But now, there is no protection of individual rights. It’s all about who can give away the most of someone else’s stuff to the “voters”.
The Founders tried, but I guess we’re just getting the slowed-down version of the French Revolution.
"The framers believed that in electing senators, state legislatures would cement their ties with the national government. They also expected that senators elected by state legislatures would be freed from pressures of public opinion and therefore better able to concentrate on legislative business and serve the needs of each state. In essence, senators would serve as “states’ ambassadors” to the federal government.This made me laugh..."state legislatures would cement their ties with the national government." I guess the Founders did not anticipate the Fed government collecting such enormous amounts of our wealth and recycling some back to the various states which thoroughly "cemented the ties."Unfortunately, problems with this system soon arose, particularly when state legislators failed to agree on a Senate candidate, causing frequent Senate vacancies. By 1826 proposals for direct election of senators began appearing, but it took reformers nearly a century to achieve this constitutional change."
There's a good write-up at Wikipedia "Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution."