How the Senate Stopped Being Picked by State Legislatures

On April 8, 1913, the 17th Amendment was ratified and Americans got the right to vote for their own senators. For the first 124 years of the Republic, they had not. Article I, Section 3 sent the choice to state legislatures — six-year terms, two senators per state, picked by the same statehouse that picked the railroad commissioners.

The Framers had thought of this as a feature. James Madison expected the indirect election to insulate the upper chamber from public passion and give state governments a direct stake in the federal one. What they did not anticipate was deadlock. After the Civil War, several state legislatures simply could not agree, and Senate seats sat empty for months at a time. Delaware once went four years with only one senator. By the 1890s, the Populist Party had made direct election a plank of its 1892 Omaha Platform.

The scandal that finally moved Congress involved Illinois senator William Lorimer. A 1912 Senate investigation concluded he had bought his seat through bribes paid to state legislators, and the Senate voted to expel him. By that point, several states had already routed around the constitutional rule. Oregon, in 1908, held a popular vote in advance of the legislative one and got the legislature to bind itself to the result. Twenty-eight other states followed in some form before the amendment passed.

The Senate that ratified the change was the same Senate it would replace. The 62nd Congress proposed the amendment in 1912; thirty-six states ratified within a year. The first election held under the new rule was a special vote in Georgia on June 15, 1913.