Pros And Cons Of The 17thamendment: American National Government

Vonelle Robertson

Professor Currie

American National Government

April 15th, 2015

Essay: Should the 17thAmendment be repealed? While citizens of each state did not directly vote in the senators of their respective states legislatures chose the senators based on the law that was adopted in the constitution in 1788.The 17th amendment came about because of the state legislature being deadlocked over the election of United States Senators. This left numerous senate vacancies lasting as long as months or even years. But this was not the first attempt to amend the constitution to elect senators by popular vote. It was first introduced in the US House of Representatives in 1826 but the amendment did not have favorable support until the late 19th century

One of the pros of doing this the Republicans claims is it gives the power back to the states now with more control in Washington. By doing this it gives the states the power to keep the federal government in check on certain issues. Here is one example of the republican support for this, “You'd have to educate people about what the 17th Amendment is all about and what the repercussions are," says Republican Jim McKelvey, who pushed the matter in his unsuccessful campaign for the Virginia House of Delegates last year. "State sovereignty has been trounced on. It's one of the big problems." The proponents’ main arguments for repealing the 17th amendment is the fact that the federal government can influence the election. Taking away the states’ right to pick their senators which worries

But people who want to keep the 17th amendment in place claim that they would not be changes very often, senator would be able to serve out their six year terms. Another reason presented to keep the amendment include that the state legislature are incapable of making a viable decision on who their senators will be based on what has happened in the past. As previously mentioned in the introduction of the essay states had a hard time choosing senators for the US senate sometimes even being completely deadlocked sometimes. This left numerous senate vacancies lasting as long as months or even years. Because of this main fact many people are reluctant to divert from the current amendment back to the old way of doing things. So now we are left with questions rather solutions to fix this problem. But there has been numerous attempts to repeal the 17th amendment since it came into law in 1913 each time it went nowhere. In today’s society there is very little reason to believe that citizens would hate losing the right to have direct elections for their senators. In a YouGov poll in November 2013 it said, “It found that voters preferred direct elections over state legislative selection by a 60 percentage point margin.”(Greenblatt) In Addition this point was further backed up by University of Illinois political scientist William