Repealing the 17th Amendment

Over at National Review, George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki makes the case for repealing the 17th Amendment and its direct election of U.S. senators:

The Constitution did not create a direct democracy; it established a constitutional republic. Its goal was to preserve liberty, not to maximize popular sovereignty. To this end, the Framers provided that the power of various political actors would derive from different sources. While House members were to be elected directly by the people, the president would be elected by the Electoral College. The people would have no direct influence on the selection of judges, who would be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve for life or "during good behavior." And senators would be elected by state legislatures.

Empowering state legislatures to elect senators was considered both good politics and good constitutional design….

The Seventeenth Amendment ended all that, bringing about the master-servant relationship between the federal and state governments that the original constitutional design sought to prevent.

Read the whole thing here. Fox host Judge Andrew Napolitano made the case for repealing the 17th Amendment to me earlier this year.