https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/07/no_author/the-17th-amendment-was-a-mistake-some-house-republicans-want-it-repealed/

By Paul Dragu
The New American
July 1, 2026

A number of House Republicans want to change how federal senators are elected so those lawmakers will focus on serving their states instead of their ambitions. They mean to do this by repealing the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Representative Keith Self (R-Texas) just introduced a joint resolution to repeal the 17th Amendment. “The current system has given us six-year politicians more focused on national ambitions and the institution of the U.S. Senate than on the states they serve,” Self said in a press release announcing the measure.

Our Founding Fathers designed the Senate to protect state sovereignty and act as a check on federal overreach. If senators are supposed to represent their states, then the states should choose them. Repealing the 17th Amendment will restore that constitutional balance and make the Senate more accountable to the people of Texas and every other state in the union.

Self, whose Freedom Score in The New American’s Freedom Index is 90 percent, points out that the Framers created a congressional structure that includes a chamber that represents the people directly (the House of Representatives), and one that represents the states (the Senate). But “the 17th Amendment disrupted this delicate balance,” he said. It weakened state governments while contributing “to the steady expansion of federal power at the expense of the states.”

Infamous Year

The 17th Amendment shifted the election power of senators from state legislatures to direct, popular vote. It was ratified in the infamous year of 1913. That’s the same year the Federal Reserve Act was passed, and it’s the same year the 16th Amendment, which burdened Americans with the federal income tax, was passed. As Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY.) told us last year, “If we could just repeal the year 1913 altogether, I think we’d be in better shape in this country.”

As we’ve written in the past, the Founders’ intent was a system that wouldn’t tolerate senators who didn’t serve their constituents:

When the Constitution was adopted, state governments were given great power and, in particular, state legislatures were given vast power. This was intended to make the language of the Constitution, which preserves the states as sovereign entities, protect that sovereignty in practice. When the two senators from each state were chosen by state legislatures, then those senators would not last long if they advocated a surrender of state power to the federal government.… After that, there were virtually no real checks that state governments had to preserve their balanced rights in our federal system.

Publisher’s Propaganda

As is usual with historic changes that have hurt the country immensely, mainstream propaganda played a role in convincing people it was a good idea to change how senators were elected. William Randolph Hearst, a publisher with control over several newspapers and magazines around the country at the time, hired fiction writer David Graham Phillips to write several articles promoting direct election (you can’t make this stuff up).

Hearst published Phillips’ series in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1906. The series, according to the U.S. government’s otherwise generous treatment of the topic, “offered an unsympathetic (and largely fictionalized) account of senators as pawns of industrialists and financiers.”