I am in favor, however, of repealing the 17th Amendment.
After reading your arguments, I think there’s another fundamental philosophical chasm at some more basic level. Generally speaking, I don’t trust people with power to do the right thing. Senators, Presidents, whoever. Elections, while imperfect, are a means of keeping those in power from straying too far. Not the only means, but a critical one – and the one that must be used to some degree to qualify the nation as a democracy. I’m also a big fan of the separation of powers – if you have to give a bunch of people power, use the power of petty infighting to help keep them in check.
In my mind, the election of senators from state legislators is, in fact, a separation of powers.
Due to some already-long-discussed issues (gerrymandering, the EC, etc), it’s become clear over the years that it’s possible for a minority of voters to retain control of the House and the Presidency indefinitely – the only question is how far a political party would go to implement this sort of minority rule. A system where the votes still happen, but one side is guaranteed to win regardless of the outcome. The Senate, for all its other faults such as its baked-in bias in favor of smaller-population states, cannot be gamed to the same degree as the House and the Presidency. Statewide elections cannot be gerrymandered. I feel it’s only because of this we haven’t seen people take full advantage of the politically-unpopular legal loopholes that could win them the House and Presidency regardless of the vote totals (because the whole concept of “politically unpopular” becomes irrelevant once you no longer rely on vote totals for your wins). There are worse things than gerrymandering floating around in the dark corners of the political world.
This is an interesting point that I’ll grant makes the direct election of senators more worthwhile, but only in contrast to the direct election of the House, not in contrast to election by the state legislature. I fail to see how gerrymandering is applicable to the indirect election of senators. They are elected by the entire state legislature, not by any boundaries within, and those legislatures are not defined by regional boundaries within a state either, so they cannot be gerrymandered.
Thus, I don’t see the Senate as a less-democratic chamber that moderates the democratic excesses of the House at all. To the contrary, I see it as the nation’s only backstop (albeit a rather weak one given its baked-in bias and limited authority) against any plan for permanent minority rule in the US a la South Africa, which, given recent events, seems to clearly be the plan of far too many. Repealing the 17th would remove that backstop, and nothing else in the Constitution would prevent the sort of minority rule that is technically easily doable within the constraints of the rest of the Constitution – the literal end of American democracy – but for the conscience of politicians, in which I don’t place a great deal of trust.
Again, I don’t see how gerrymandering applies in this instance. If it did, I would see the strength of your argument. However, the senators would still depend on the election of their state’s legislators, who in turn would still be answerable to the people of the entire state. Therefore, I don’t see a way that a party in power could twist the laws to maintain minority rule. If I am wrong in my information, please correct me.