But Todd Zywicki from the The Volokh Conspiracy is speaking at Marquette University today on whether The 17th Amendment should be repealed. For those not familiar, the 17th Amendment changed the way in which Senators are elected. Prior the 17th, they were elected by state legislatures. Now of course they are popularly elected by the people. Todd points to two interesting articles here and here on the topic.

The general thought behind repealing it is to hopefully bring back the notion of federalism. Before the 17th Amendment was passed, it can be strongly argued that the Senate fought for state's rights because they were really acting on behalf of state legislatures... as the state's representative to the government. Since then of course the Federal government's power has increased dramatically. It's an interesting argument, and I hope that there is some sort of transcript from Todd's presentation at Marquette.