Comment by dsfyu404ed

> Lol. That was done to placate the slave owners.

The 17th amendment was passed ~50yr after the civil war, a point in time when the overwhelming majority of the electorate had no memory of overt slavery and the people who did or who's parents did were even less influential than before due to immigration waves and industrialization (which concentrated population money and power in the northeast and Midwest generally speaking). Please f right off with your revisionist history.

>Anyone suggesting that the US Senate as constituted for the last century is a populist institution may require institutional help of another kind.

This is rich coming from the guy that just said an amendment passed in the 1900s was done to placate slave owners.

Regardless of the intent of the amendment, only a complete fool would claim that making appointed positions directly elected doesn't make the body formed by those positions more subject to populist sentiments than it previously was.

I'm not entirely sold on the idea that direct electing the senate is a bad thing but it doesn't take a genius to look at the situation before and after and see that there are pros and cons to both. Like you can literally pick up a history book and look at the influences the senate was beholden to and strongly pushed around by before and after the change.