Opinion of the 17th amendment

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

The Senate was created to allow states to have equal representation. It may have prevented an earlier civil war, in fact. Of course, you are spot on about it being a cesspool of corruption.

And it ended up being a gateway for the already rich and powerful to be appointed to a Congressional position.

Again, it basically still is; the House is the same but a little less so.

[traininthedistance]

I think that one can make an entirely plausible argument that gerrymandering in the House has made it such that, right now, the Senate is a vastly better representation of the "will of the people".  This despite its flagrant by-design malapportionment, which is more than a little scary.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I wouldn't go that far, but you can certainly argue that it is infinitely better at reflecting the sort of minor shifts in the People's Will that is a central feature of the political life of most democracies. Of course, when the swing is on, the swing is on, and the House still falls, but generally the swing isn't on.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

The American system has always had this weird thing of stressing the need to have equality between the legal identities known as states so that the national legislature isn't dominated by the interests of one state over the other yet at the same time makes the national legislature the creator of such identities based on their own prerogatives. That is, after all, how every single post-1776 state was made - all 37 of them. From that perspective, the senate has worked as well as could be expected.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Freedom Amendment, obviously.