a merger of stability..................

 

     As early as 1826, there were proposals to amend the Constitution by members who saw the legislative elections as fraught with corruption and delay.  At the start of the twentieth century, William Jennings Bryan and others pushed for direct elections, and many argued that the Senate was " a sort of aristocratic body too far removed from the people, beyond their reach, and with no special interest in their welfare."  It was an interesting argument, since that was precisely what it was designed to do.  The framers wanted to merge the stability of oligarchic and democratic systems.  This marriage was perfectly captured in a House with short terms of popular-election members and a Senate with longe terms of legislatively selected members.  That changed in 1913 with the Seventeenth Amendment specifying that senators would be chosen, like House members, in direct elections.  While there were clearly good arguments for direct elections to make senators more accountable to the voters, the change removed arguably the most important control of states in Congress.  With the expansive interpretation given interstate commerce, states would face increasing federal authority and decreasing political control.

-Jonathan Turley, Rage and the Republic:  The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution