The Tea Party’s goofy fetish for amending the Constitution.

It seemed unthinkable that Vaughn Ward wouldn’t, someday, be a U.S. congressman. The decorated Iraq war vet had been handpicked by national Republicans to run against endangered Democrat Walt Minnick for Idaho’s first congressional district. Although he was somewhat gaffe-prone (he had an unfortunate tendency to plagiarize campaign speeches from sources like Barack Obama, for instance), Ward had the boyish good looks, the résumé, and—best of all, for one of the reddest states in the country—Sarah Palin’s blessing. All he had to do was win a GOP primary against Raul Labrador, a relatively young state legislator. What could go wrong?

But there was one thing Ward didn’t see coming—the Seventeenth Amendment. In late April, both Ward and Labrador went on Idaho public television for a discussion of the race. On the show, a local college professor asked the candidates if they were in favor of repealing the amendment, which allows U.S. senators to be elected directly, rather than appointed by state legislatures. Labrador insisted that yes, he did. Ward seemed slightly taken aback—after all, the question doesn’t come up often—but quickly concurred, and even came up with a rationale for scrapping the amendment: “I think that that’s been part of the problem of eroding away states’ rights, where that body, the Senate, is no longer beholden and tied to the state.” For the next two weeks, Idaho’s editorial pages mocked Ward for wanting to take away direct elections, until the candidate finally reversed himself, insisting he was only talking about term limits. Yet that brought up a new problem: Idaho’s largest Tea Party group savaged Ward for his spinelessness and backed Labrador, who went on to win the GOP primary.

It seemed unthinkable that Vaughn Ward wouldn’t, someday, be a U.S. congressman. The decorated Iraq war vet had been handpicked by national Republicans to run against endangered Democrat Walt Minnick for Idaho’s first congressional district. Although he was somewhat gaffe-prone (he had an unfortunate tendency to plagiarize campaign speeches from sources like Barack Obama, for instance), Ward had the boyish good looks, the résumé, and—best of all, for one of the reddest states in the country—Sarah Palin’s blessing. All he had to do was win a GOP primary against Raul Labrador, a relatively young state legislator. What could go wrong?

But there was one thing Ward didn’t see coming—the Seventeenth Amendment. In late April, both Ward and Labrador went on Idaho public television for a discussion of the race. On the show, a local college professor asked the candidates if they were in favor of repealing the amendment, which allows U.S. senators to be elected directly, rather than appointed by state legislatures. Labrador insisted that yes, he did. Ward seemed slightly taken aback—after all, the question doesn’t come up often—but quickly concurred, and even came up with a rationale for scrapping the amendment: “I think that that’s been part of the problem of eroding away states’ rights, where that body, the Senate, is no longer beholden and tied to the state.” For the next two weeks, Idaho’s editorial pages mocked Ward for wanting to take away direct elections, until the candidate finally reversed himself, insisting he was only talking about term limits. Yet that brought up a new problem: Idaho’s largest Tea Party group savaged Ward for his spinelessness and backed Labrador, who went on to win the GOP primary.

Editorial writers may have found the furor over the Seventeenth Amendment ridiculous, but Tea Partiers took it very seriously. “It was definitely a major factor” in backing Labrador, says Brendan Smythe, president of Tea Party Boise. “It’s one of our top issues.” Ordinary citizens, the Tea Partiers had decided, lack the ability to keep tabs on dissembling senators. “We have to feed our children, go to soccer games—we don’t have time to keep an eye on those guys,” explains Smythe. “The ones that can really hold them accountable are the ones who know the games they’re playing”—that is, other politicians. In the Progressive era, reformers had come to the opposite conclusion: When senators owed their jobs to other politicians, the result was less transparency and more corruption. In 1899, copper magnate William Clark had famously purchased himself a Montana Senate seat by handing out monogrammed envelopes containing $10,000 in cash. But Tea Partiers took a darker view of those Progressive reformers. “[The Seventeenth Amendment] didn’t get adopted until 1913, along with the Sixteenth Amendment, the income tax,” says Smythe. “And you also had the institution of the Federal Reserve. So those three acts combined—that was the start of the federal power grab.”