Just last week, Congressman Keith Self introduced a resolution to repeal the Seventeenth. And this time the idea doesn’t seem quite as crazy.
Background: When the Constitution was drafted, and for well over a century afterward, the Senate wasn’t popularly elected. The Constitution provided for the choice of Senators by state legislatures. One did not really campaign for a Senate seat, one lobbied. This was consistent with the Constitutional plan, in which the House of Representatives represented the people, while the Senate represented the states.
The Progressive movement didn’t much like this (a cynic might suggest that they thought it would be easier to demagogue the public than state legislatures made up of cynical politicians.) The 17th was also very much in keeping with the more democracy mood of the era. The franchise had been expanded from a minority of white men with property, to all white men, to all men, and was well on the way (just two amendments later!) to being extended to women.
Voters were impatient, and there was less appreciation of the careful structural compromises that had been made when the Constitution was drafted. By having a house of Congress that was responsive to the concerns of the states as states, the original design of the Senate served as a counterweight to federal ambition. Once the Senate was just a smaller version of the House with bigger districts, that changed. Public passions mattered more (vitiated only somewhat by the Senate’s longer terms) and Senators now had to campaign.