Featured How Would You Change Washington DC?

The people had representation through the House of Representatives. The Senate was intended to be a national-level representative body for the individual state governments. No individual citizen was stripped of representation by the institution of the 17th Amendment. The state governments, though, did lose their representation.

See my answer above. The state governments lost their representation. The bicameral design of the American congress was meant to be similar in nature to the Parliament, which has a House of Lords and a House of Commons. Since the US does not have titles of lordship or nobility, we developed a system by which the citizens of a state and the government of a state both had representation.

Originally the federal government was supposed to be quite weak. The vast majority of governance was supposed to take place at the state level. Once the state governments lost their representation at the federal level, they were rendered greatly weakened. That's a fact that's hard to argue.

Potentially, yes, a sitting Senator would have to reconsider their policy stance. There is a difference when representing the state government and its needs versus representing the state's citizenry and its needs.

Yes, this is a possible argument. The truth is, though, that we now have an entire class of career politicians who would rather be in office than execute the duties of that office. Consider the 2-year term House of Representatives. Since it often takes a year to mount a successful campaign, the elected official gets only about a year to do anything meaningful. This type of wastefulness has to change.

 

Senators did not represent their state citizenry. They represented their state government.

The original intention of the founders was to have a nation comprised of states wherein the state's population and the state's government were represented at the national level. The state governments were meant to be the level at which 90% of governance took place, with the federal government only holding 10% of the power in peace time. Naturally, at times of war the federal government would be stronger in an effort to direct a more unified front, but in times of peace, the states were meant to be more powerful than the federal government.

That is certainly no longer the case, and a big reason for that is the fact that the state governments are now powerless in Washington.

 

What kind of answer are you looking for, ITL? I've already told you that Senators represented their state governments prior to the 17th Amendment. I'd be willing to bet that the political game was played basically the same way prior to the amendment as after, only the actual people being represented had changed.

The state, when speaking in terms solely of the citizenry, lost no representation in the 17th Amendment. In fact, they gained a new chamber of congress. But the state, speaking in terms of state legislature, lost all of their federal level representation.