[AnthonyMouse]

> Those representatives were supposed to make national decisions on your behalf, including choosing the president.

This is, incidentally, how we massively screwed up the federal government. In the original design US Senators were elected by the state legislatures, the premise being that they would prevent federal overreach into the regulatory domain of the states because they would be directly accountable to the state governments.

Then populists who wanted to do everything at the federal level pushed for the 17th Amendment which eliminated the state governments' representation in the federal government and people stopped caring about local politics because it started feeling like an exercise in futility when federal law could preempt anything you wanted to do and the thing meant to keep that in check was deleted.

And the federal government was supposed to have enumerated (i.e. narrow, limited) powers. It doesn't have the scaffolding for people to hold it accountable. You can elect the local dogcatcher but the only elected office in the entire federal executive branch is the President of the United States. Which is fine when the main thing they're doing is negotiating treaties and running the Post Office but not fine if you're trying to do thousands of pages of federal regulations on everything from healthcare to banking to labor to energy.

[dkuntz2]

That's somewhat ahistorical, the 17th amendment happened because state legislatures were frequently deadlocked and could not appoint senators, meaning states went without senate representation entirely.

In a fifteen year period 46 senate elections were deadlocked in 20 states, at one point Delaware had an open senate seat for four years due to this.

That said the proper reform to this would've been the abolition of the senate, as it has always been and will always be an anti-democratic force, not moving for senators to be elected by the people.

[AnthonyMouse]

> That's somewhat ahistorical, the 17th amendment happened because state legislatures were frequently deadlocked and could not appoint senators, meaning states went without senate representation entirely.

That seems more like an excuse than a legitimate reason. If that was actually the problem you could solve it by adopting a mechanism to break ties, putting the vote to the public only in the event of a tie, having the state legislatures use score voting which makes two candidates getting exactly the same score far less likely, etc.

But if they want to do a power grab then they get further by saying "we have to do something about these deadlocks" than by saying "we want to do a power grab".

> That said the proper reform to this would've been the abolition of the senate, as it has always been and will always be an anti-democratic force

It's supposed to be an anti-democratic force, like the Supreme Court, the existence of Constitutional rights and the entire concept of even having a federal government instead of allowing local voters to have full plenary power over local laws. Unconstrained direct democracy is a populist whirlwind of impulsive reactionary forces.

[judahmeek]

> Unconstrained direct democracy is a populist whirlwind of impulsive reactionary forces.

This is a great point as is the point that the existence of a federal government itself is anti-democratic.

The Senate was initially created as a body that was incentivized to promote federalism itself (especially through their power to approve federal judges) & a federalist republic seems to be the most democratic system because it incentivizes a balance between individual liberty & the ability to restrict someone else's liberty through law.

Right now, the balance of power is too centralized which makes for radical changes every time a different political party takes control of government.