Feingold's amendment: the worst kind of pig-ignorant populist nonsense

On the subject of the Seventeenth amendment, I feel the largest problem with direct democracy for the Senate--and I think this applies to the Presidency also--is not the upset of the balance between state and federal power, its that people are actually less represented--not more represented--when any large-scale election is done without intermediary representatives.

If someone's state legislator supported the election of a Senator and a citizen is unhappy with the Senator's action, he can organize pretty easily within his community to unseat his state legislator, and elect someone who'll make better decisions. On the other hand, if the Senator is elected by popular vote, one citizen is a just drop in a pool of millions of voters, and his ability to organize and create change is reduced. Elections are now influenced more by money to purchase things like TV ads and mailers, than by individual organizers.

So--in a way that may seem unintuitive to many people--the individual citizen is actually represented better by indirect elections, because he's allowed to be more involved in determining his representatives and participating in the process of government.

The same logic would apply when we're talking about the direct election of a President versus election via an electoral college.

From my understanding of the history of it, the driving force behind the Seventeenth Amendment wasn't a simple fetish for pure democracy, but the feeling that the Senate had become corrupt and Senators were bought out by various interests as back-room deals were made to appoint them. Unfortunately, all that happened with its passage, is that one form of corruption was replaced with another.