"Why Would Anyone Want to Take Away People’s Rights to Elect Their Senators?"

"Repealing the 17th Amendment has long been a hobbyhorse of the fringe right, but the Tea Party and Paulite libertarians popularized it, along with their fetishization of a revisionist view of the Founders and states’ rights. The idea is that if state legislators elect senators, Congress will be responsive to the needs of state governments, and thus preserve states’ rights and prerogatives. As with many right-wing ideas that emerged from the fringe, this one appears to have started with the John Birch Society. As Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum wrote in 2011, when Perry was getting attention for his anti-17th Amendment views, 'it’s popped up periodically on the fringe of movement conservatism ever since. In the 80s, W. Cleon Skousen, a big early influence on the JBS and later a big influence on Glenn Beck, began pitching repeal of the 17th Amendment again, and a few years after that Ron Paul took up the banner. Former Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia introduced a bill in 2004 to repeal the amendment, and in 2009 repeal became a talking point among the Tea Party crowd.'"

Alex Seitz-Wald in Salon discusses the rise of the "seventeenthers."