Politics > 17th Amendment

Repeal the 17th Amendment

Progressive reformers complained of backroom deals and corruption. But the direct election by the people of US senators has only made things worse.

Bob Kingsley | April 17, 2026

The Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, during the height of the Progressive Era.  Reformers argued that state legislatures had become hopelessly deadlocked and corrupt.  Between 1885 and 1912, legislatures deadlocked seventy-one times over Senate selections, leaving at least seventeen seats vacant for entire sessions or longer.  States went unrepresented in Washington, while lawmakers wasted months on partisan warfare.

Scandals amplified the outrage.  In Montana, copper baron William A. Clark admitted to spending the equivalent of millions in today’s dollars to buy his seat; the Senate refused to seat him.  In Illinois, Senator William Lorimer was expelled in 1912 after evidence showed that four state legislators had been bribed to break a deadlock in his favor.  Muckrakers branded the Senate a “millionaires’ club” owned by railroads and industrialists.  Direct popular election, they promised, would purify politics, end backroom deals, and return power to the people.

A century later, the juxtaposition is bitterly ironic.  The very accusations that justified the amendment — inside dealing, special interest capture, and elite control — now define the system it created, only on a far grander, national scale.  Senators still face charges of being bought, but the buyers are no longer a handful of state legislators.  They are national donors, super-PACs, and billionaires who pour hundreds of millions into perpetual campaigns.  The “cure” has recreated the disease, only now the price tag is measured in billions rather than thousands.

The original constitutional design was no accident.  Article........

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