It is an odd stance, to be sure. (If you really want to start repealing amendments, why not go after the Third Amendment, the one that outlaws the forcible quartering of soldiers in peacetime? Would anyone really mind letting a few cadets stay the night?) But the idea is worth a more serious examination, if only to try to understand the forces that would lead a group of politically engaged Americans to demand the curtailment of their own franchise.

For more than a century after the nation’s founding, as part of the framers’ compromise between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian ideals, the power to appoint senators rested with state legislators, while the masses got to choose members of the House of Representatives.

In 1906, the writer David Graham Phillips published a series of articles in Cosmopolitan  a New Yorker of its day  exposing corruption among senators who bought their seats from legislators and used them to get even richer. (Mr. Phillips’s main target was a Rhode Island senator named Nelson Aldrich, a rubber and sugar magnate whose ties to corporate interests make today’s senators look like a fraternity of Buddhist monks.)

Mr. Phillips’s work wasn’t the sole driver of change, but like Upton Sinclair, whose “Jungle” was published almost simultaneously, his influence among progressives was significant. As Nancy C. Unger, a biographer of the progressive titan Robert La Follette, explains it, the series spurred public outrage, and soon Mr. La Follette and other reformers had added the direct election of senators to a list of proposals that also included women’s suffrage and workers’ safety. The 17th Amendment took effect in 1913.

In recent years, repeal of the 17th Amendment has been advocated, sporadically and to little effect, by such conservatives as the columnist George Will, the presidential gadfly Alan Keyes and Zell Miller, the former Democratic senator from Georgia. Their basic argument is that the amendment effectively eliminated the only real oversight that state legislatures had over Washington, which has in turn encouraged Washington to pile unfunded mandates onto the states.