Should the 17th Amendment be repealed?

[Eupolis]

Originally posted by CutiePie2000
I started reading this, but zoned out after the 3rd sentence.
Consequently, I do not understand what this is about?
Can someone please explain it in 2 or less sentences?
Many thanks.

CutiePie2000
~A Canadian who does not get American Politics at all.....

Not really -- American Constitutional law tends to depend on lots and lots of insanely long sentences.

The short short version: the editorial asks whether state governments should have more of a say in federal government by allowing them to choose U.S. Senators. This was the way it was originally done, but that changed after the 17th Amendment early in the 20th Century.

Now, I'll try to sum up more of the details in a few relatively short sentences.

1) U.S. government is broken in to three branches: legislative, executive, and judiciary. We're only looking at the first one here, the legislative branch.

2) The legislative branch is broken into two "houses:" The House of Representatives and the Senate. A bill may pass the legislature only if both houses have approved it. Only then may the President decide whether to sign it to enact it into law. (If the President refuses to sign, the bill becomes law only if 2/3 of each house approves after a second vote).

3) The House of Representatives is elected, each member from a particular voting district. Each district has approximatly equal population. The number of Representatives that each state has is determined based upon the federal Census. Representatives serve two-year terms.

4) Each state gets two Senators in the Senate. Under modern law, the Senate is elected by the general population of each state. There are no separate Senate districts -- the entire state votes. Senators serve six-year terms.

5) Under OLD law, before the 17th Amendment, the Senators were elected by the legislatures of the states. So, before, the 17th Amendment, Colorado's Senators would have been chosen by the legislature of Colorado.

==

So the gist of the article is, should we go back to doing #5 instead of #4? And I say, no, because I don't want states to be overly able to assert local interests over the best interests of the country. I'm all for states managing local matters locally, if it doesn't burden other parts of the country. But the more interconnected we become, the more consistent we need a lot of the laws to be. Also, there are a lot of large-scale nationwide problems that really are best handled on a nationwide level. I'm more comfortable dealing with the evolution of constitutional doctrine through the law than I am with the huge shift in balances a repeal of the 17th Amendment would entail.