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The practical effect of the 17th Amendment was to relocate the locus of corruption from the state legislatures to K Street.

Would you say that today's federal corruption is of a centralized unitary kind, where the old corruption was unique to the peculiarities of each state? Or were all the states just variations of a theme where corruption was concerned?

Would it be easier to deal with state by state corruption instead of the federal corruption where they all banded together to protect each other?

-PJ

Back then, the senators from Pennsylvania were known as the senators from King Coal, those from Montana as the senators from Anaconda Copper, and the two from California as the senators from the Southern Pacific Railroad. The old robber barons owned the Senate via owning their respective state legislatures.

The Progressives managed to break this stranglehold during the TR and Wilson administrations via law and changing the Constitution. But when money moves around, it's hard to prevent people from grifting on that money. It's like trying to keep ants out of the pantry. You plug one hole, and they'll find another way to get in. But K Street has become so powerful that there might be an advantage to forcing a breakup of K Street and pushing that graft and corruption back into the states. Might.

I'm an old cynic when it comes to human behavior, so I suspect we'll reopen an old can of worms if we repeal the 17th Amendment. But I can see one way to make it work.

Under the Articles of Confederation, congresscritters were appointed by the state legislatures, and those legislatures could recall them. We don't have that under the Constitution. Even before the 17th Amendment, the state legislatures appointed senators for a six year term. Maybe a repeal of the 17th should have senators be appointed by the state legislatures on an "at will" basis with a caveat concerning term limits. The senator has that job until he dies, quits, is term limited, or the legislature terminates his employment.