Amendment Seventeen: A Blessing? Or a Curse?

Our thoroughly educated and distinguished founding fathers spent more time on the careful construction of our Senate than on any other topic. They wanted it to be populated with the highest and best humanity had to offer. So, they concluded, by a vote of 10 to 0, that such a Senate could best be achieved by assigning State legislatures the chore of selecting them; not the public at large who were already given the House of Representatives.

They would no doubt be biased in this regard, but if...