Alan Keyes's Daffy Idea to Repeal the 17th Amendment  News at
Home  Mr. Gould, professor emeritus at the University of Texas
at Austin, is writing a history of the Senate in the twentieth
century.  Alan Keyes, the Republican senatorial candidate in
Illinois, has now joined Senator Zell Miller of Georgia and
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in calling for repeal of the
Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, the one that provides
for the direct election of United States senators. Senator
Miller, who has introduced his own amendment to repeal the
Seventeenth, contends that the direct election of senators “was
the death of the careful balance between state and federal
governments.” Once the Senate was the province of members “who
thoughtfully make up their own minds, as they did during the
Senate’s greatest era of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun.” Now
senators, in Miller’s view, “are mere cat’s paws for the special
interests.” Miller favors returning the right to elect senators
to the state legislatures who had tha