Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides for direct election of U.S. Senators by the people of the state they represent. Prior to its enactment, some states' laws had provided for the appointment of Senators by the state legislature. James MacMullin advocates repealing the Seventeenth Amendment.

Views
A common argument against the Seventeenth Amendment is that it reduces the influence of state politicians in the federal system; this increases the tendency to expand federal power. This assumes, however, that the state politicians are opposed to the expansion of federal power, and that the voters are supportive of expanding federal power. Since the same voters who, under the Seventeenth Amendment, elect U.S. Senators also elect the state legislators, presumably those legislators tend to share those voters' opinions, including perhaps their opinions on how powerful the federal government should be.

Agency problems presumably increase as additional layers of indirect election are added. This is sometimes viewed as a strength rather than a weakness of a system, since an electorate may choose its best decision-makers as representatives, and those representatives may in turn, using their superior decision-making power, choose an even better decision-maker as a super-representative. A criticism of this is that the electorate needs more information to choose a representative than to actually make the decisions that the representative would make.