JUST REPEAL THE SEVENTEENTH AMENDMENT.

I confess to not being a fan of several of the so-called Progressive Era amendments to the Federal Constitution. "Do we get to include all the policy failures as well? Direct election of senators? Prohibition of liquor? Income taxation? All the administrative state apparatus that came with two wars and the New Deal?"

Now comes Larry Hackney, suggesting that direct election of Senators and state Governors gives the thickly settled areas too much electoral power within states.  "Currently, population centers in many states — New York, Illinois, Georgia, Virginia, and California, just to name a few — can sway the vote for one presidential or statewide candidate (governor, senator), giving that state to that candidate even though the other candidate won the majority of the counties in that state."

I'm not sure whether determining a state governor on the basis of counties carried is a good idea or not: presumably there are state legislatures that ought to be exercising their powers, especially in states where authoritarian governors are arbitrarily extending the house arrests, and simulating the presidential election with a fixed number of counties is likely to cause the same sorts of electoral anomalies and ill will that the current assignment of electoral votes based on the size of a House of Representatives that was last changed in 1929 is producing.

But putting the authority to appoint senators back in the hands of the state legislatures?  That might be a good idea, as the direct election of senators simply generates a hundred showboaters who, once they have put together their in-state coalition and gone to Washington City, start thinking of themselves as potential presidents.  Yes, a legislatively determined senator might still immediately want to get into the presidential conversation, but legislators might be able to deliberate over whether sending a person likely to behave in that way to the federal capital is desirable.