“I don’t want to imagine a modern day when corrupt State legislators get to hand pick Senators, yuck.”
You have hit on the very reason that the 17th Amendment passed in the first place.
Election by state legislators was just as rife with corruption as you suspect. People need to go back and read the public debate that led to popular election of Senators.
There is no panacea. Just a different brand of poison.
What you write about state legislative corruption is well-known by historians but your statement about no panacea is wrong.
The addition of a voter recall provision allows for voters to fire their US Senators. The 17th Amendment allowed voters to hire their US Senators. That was the wrong thing to do because it boomeranged back on state voters by having their state legislatures become irrelevant and so starting a long trek towards massive federal centralization where today the federal government controls and regulates more than 90% of every aspect of life.
In other words, freedoms were traded for uniform federal codes.
Today’s motto should replace the 17th Amendment with “You can fire them but you can’t hire them”. That puts the voters as a Board of Directors rather than as executives, and that is a much better arrangement because most voters can never truly know their US Senate candidates by words alone, only by deeds are they known. And misdeeds should permit firing.
Here’s a form of amendment that has reached debate at the highest levels now in which national news featured its recall provision just a few weeks ago as to how it would have stopped cold, for example, the 2010 passage of Obamacare:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3583879/posts?page=23#23
Pay attention to how control of the amendment’s language falls to state houses and state voters, and never to any branch of federal government. Because of how it is written, federal government will not be able to interfere with it. If anyone disagrees with that, ask them to give an example how he federal government can take control of such an amendment; answer: no example exists short of tyranny.