The Vote They Want to Take From You
Nine House Republicans have introduced a resolution to repeal the 17th Amendment and hand the choosing of United States senators back to state legislatures. In Kansas, they are already drafting a workaround. Behind them stands a president who has spent the year sabotaging his own party’s bills to force through an elections overhaul, and who this spring drew a constitutional fitness inquiry from fifty members of Congress. Read this carefully. It is the same story.
On the twenty-fifth of June, while most of the country was watching the Senate quarrel over a voter-ID bill and the president’s latest ultimatum on foreign policy, Representative Keith Self of Texas quietly filed a joint resolution in the House of Representatives to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The amendment is not obscure. It is the one that lets you vote for your senator. Its repeal would return the choosing of one hundred United States senators to fifty state legislatures, ending 113 years of direct election. Self is not alone. Eight of his House Republican colleagues signed on immediately — Eric Burlison of Missouri, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Andy Harris of Maryland, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Clay Higgins of Louisiana, Sheri Biggs of South Carolina and Michael Cloud of Texas. In their announcement they described the current system, in which Americans elect their own senators, as an injury to the Republic that should be surgically removed.
It is easy, and it is the temptation of every centrist columnist in Washington, to wave this off. A joint resolution is not a bill. It has no realistic path to passage. Repealing a constitutional amendment requires two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and ratification by thirty-eight state legislatures — a bar so high that the country has cleared it only once, when Prohibition was undone in 1933. The reflex is to call the resolution a stunt, a message bill, a fundraising email dressed in the language of federalism, and move on.
The reflex is wrong. What Representative Self has done is put a marker down on a project the Republican Party has been building at the state level for years. The idea is no longer a Tea Party cocktail-hour daydream. It is a working plan, and it is already being executed piecemeal in the states.
1. The Kansas preview
To understand why the House resolution matters, look at Kansas — where Republicans are not waiting for a constitutional amendment. Democracy Docket reported last week that a 2025 state law, Senate Bill 105, has stripped the Democratic governor’s traditional authority to fill U.S. Senate vacancies and handed the process to the Republican-controlled legislature. Under the old rule, in place since 1927, Kansas governors chose temporary replacements outright. Under SB 105, Democratic Governor Laura Kelly may pick only from a slate of three names produced through a legislative process the GOP dominates.
The bill was written by state Senator Mike Thompson, who has publicly called the 17th Amendment “a big mistake.” Thompson told The Kansas City Star that the legislation was prompted by rumors that Senator Roger Marshall, the state’s Republican senator up for reelection this year, might be appointed to a position in the Trump administration. If Marshall were to vacate his seat before October 2, a legislative attorney explained in a Kansas Senate hearing, the election to fill the seat permanently would be delayed until 2028 — and, in the interim, the Republican legislature would effectively choose the state’s next senator over the objections of the sitting Democratic governor.
Governor Kelly named the design plainly. “It seems the only way any one of these three can win is by colluding to cheat,” she said of the arrangement. She described the maneuver as an attempt to “hijack political power” — the very charge the 17th Amendment was ratified to prevent.
“These big Senate seats have become national elections because there’s money coming in all over the place. That’s why the founders wanted the senators to be appointed. Because they were a lot more accountable to the state legislature, which is accountable to the people.”
— Kansas State Sen. Mike Thompson, architect of SB 105
Read that quotation carefully. Thompson is not concealing the argument. He is stating it. The problem, as he sees it, is that Senate elections have become “national,” meaning that voters, journalists and donors outside the state pay attention. The remedy is to move the choice out of the voters’ hands entirely and into a chamber, the Kansas legislature, that the Republican Party controls by supermajority regardless of how the statewide vote breaks. It is a solution in search of a democracy problem, and it happens to end democracy.
2. The federal push, in the open
Representative Self’s resolution is the national-level companion piece to the Kansas maneuver. His press release gives the argument in the plainest terms yet. “The current system has given us six-year politicians more focused on national ambitions and the institution of the U.S. Senate than on the states they serve,” Self wrote. “Our Founding Fathers designed the Senate to protect state sovereignty and act as a check on federal overreach. If senators are supposed to represent their states, then the states should choose them.”
His co-sponsors made the political motivation explicit. Congressman Andy Harris of Maryland told the Cecil Daily that under a repealed 17th Amendment, “if a senator today refused to support (or even debate) a popular measure like the SAVE America Act, but the state legislature supported it, the legislature could replace that senator.” Louisiana Republican Clay Higgins, in a statement quoted by the Washington Examiner, called the 17th Amendment “arguably the most injurious amendment in history.” Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona framed the Senate as “a perpetual roadblock to the will of the American people” that should be brought to heel.
What the co-sponsors keep saying, in careful legal drag, is that the elected Senate has become inconvenient — that it fails to pass the president’s priority bills quickly enough, that it fails to bend to what House hardliners describe as “the will of the American people,” and that the remedy is to remove Americans from the equation entirely. The bill’s timing is not coincidence. It arrives, as Newsweek reported, in the middle of an escalating House-Senate feud over the SAVE America Act — an elections overhaul that is stuck in the Senate. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and other House hardliners have vowed to freeze the House floor until the Senate passes it. Representative Self, in a post on X shortly before filing his resolution, wrote of the Senate: “Enforce the talking filibuster or NUKE IT and get this bill passed. INACTION IS NOT AN OPTION!”
The message is not subtle. The Senate will not obey. Therefore the Senate must be redesigned so that it does.
3. What the 17th Amendment actually fixed
Repeal proponents are fond of appealing to what “the Founders intended.” It is worth remembering what that system produced in practice, and why it was scrapped.
Before ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913, state legislatures selected United States senators. According to the National Archives, the system generated legislative deadlocks that left Senate seats vacant for entire sessions, backroom deals in which railroad barons and industrial trusts effectively purchased Senate seats through statehouse bribery, and long stretches in which powerful economic interests dictated who represented the states in Washington. The National Constitution Center describes the amendment’s ratification as a response to “the influence of corrupt state legislatures.” A 1912 Senate investigation into the bribery-purchased election of Illinois Senator William Lorimer was the final straw that convinced reformers only a constitutional amendment could fix the problem.
The 17th Amendment was not, in other words, a Progressive Era mistake. It was a Progressive Era correction. It was the response to a demonstrated century of oligarchy, in which the Senate had become a private club whose membership was arranged by whoever could pay the state house’s asking price. Journalist David Graham Phillips titled his famous 1906 Cosmopolitan series exposing the corruption “The Treason of the Senate.” Muckrakers were not exaggerating. The system was broken, obviously and publicly. The country amended the Constitution to end it.
What today’s repealers are proposing, then, is not a return to the wisdom of the founders. It is a return to the corruption the founders’ successors already lived through and rejected.
4. The math of minority rule
The practical effect of a repeal is not hard to calculate. According to MultiState’s 2026 tally, Republicans hold full control of 28 state legislatures. Democrats control 18. Four are split, and Nebraska’s unicameral chamber is officially nonpartisan. Under a repealed 17th Amendment, the Republican Party would begin the process of choosing 56 United States senators from GOP-controlled statehouses. Democrats would begin from a base of 36. That is not a hypothetical partisan tilt. It is an entrenched supermajority manufactured by state legislative maps that Republican-controlled statehouses have drawn for themselves.
Under a repealed 17th Amendment, the Republican Party would begin choosing 56 senators to Democrats’ 36 — before a single voter cast a ballot. MultiState, 2026.
Kansas SB 105 shows the pattern: even where a Democrat sits in the governor’s mansion, GOP legislative supermajorities could still control Senate selection. Democracy Docket.
A Democratic voter in gerrymandered Wisconsin or North Carolina would see their statewide Senate vote nullified in favor of a legislature whose district maps do not reflect the state’s actual vote share.
The effect on red-state voters is not benign either. A Republican voter in Alabama, Tennessee or Texas would not gain from repeal — she would simply lose the ability to punish her senator at the ballot box. Her one lever of accountability, the six-year check of a statewide election, would be replaced by a lever pulled by whichever faction dominates her statehouse. The rise of a primary challenger, an unpopular vote on Social Security, a scandal — none of it would matter if the state legislative caucus was on board with her senator. That is the point. It is not a check on federal power. It is the removal of a check on federal senators.
The 17th Amendment did not weaken the states. It weakened political machines. Those are not the same thing, and one should not pretend otherwise.
5. The president’s fingerprints
President Trump has not, to date, personally endorsed repeal of the 17th Amendment. He does not need to. The strategy pursued from the Oval Office all year has been the same strategy Representative Self is now putting in resolution form: bend the Senate to the president’s will, or work around it.
Consider the record. In February, Mr. Trump threatened to impose voter identification requirements by executive order if the Senate would not pass the SAVE America Act — a bill that critics say would strip more than 21 million eligible Americans of their voting rights by requiring documentation many voters, particularly married women and low-income Americans, do not have easy access to, per CNN’s reporting. That order was permanently blocked by a federal court last week. In March, per CNBC, he vowed on Truth Social that he “will not sign other Bills” until the SAVE Act passed, adding: “It must be done immediately. It supersedes everything else.”
He kept the promise. In the last week of June, as NPR reported, Mr. Trump abruptly canceled the signing of bipartisan legislation aimed at bringing down housing costs, holding it hostage until Congress delivered his elections bill. As MSNBC contributor Steve Benen observed, Mr. Trump “even derailed a popular and bipartisan housing bill, championed by the leaders of his own party, effectively taking the measure hostage this week until lawmakers pass the SAVE America Act.” Fox News, hardly a hostile witness, reported that a bloc of Trump-aligned House Republicans led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna had vowed to grind the House floor to a halt until the bill passed.
This is the pattern into which the 17th Amendment repeal fits. The president wants an elections overhaul the Senate will not deliver. His House allies, in turn, are proposing to redesign the Senate. In every state where Republican legislatures have already advanced SAVE Act-style laws — Missouri, Iowa, others — the pattern is identical: consolidate control over who votes at the state level, then consolidate control over who counts at the federal level. Repealing the 17th Amendment would be the capstone. It would make the SAVE Act unnecessary, because there would be no meaningful Senate election to police.
“There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots.”
— President Donald Trump, on Truth Social, February 2026
What “whether approved by Congress or not” means, when the president says it, is that the elected legislature of the United States is optional. Mr. Trump has not said the same about the elected Senate. But the House Republicans who share his agenda have now put that same idea, formally, into a joint resolution.
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6. The timeline of an eroding norm
These events are not separate stories. They are the same story, in slow motion. Read across the timeline and the shape of the plan comes into focus: consolidate election rules at the federal level, and if the Senate resists, redesign the Senate.
The founders left “unable” undefined for a reason. This is the reason.
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment permits the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet — or, critically, “such other body as Congress may by law provide” — to declare in writing that the President “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The Vice President then assumes acting authority. The amendment’s drafters, working after the trauma of the Kennedy assassination, deliberately declined to define the words “unable” or “inability.” That silence was not sloppy draftsmanship. It was the whole point.
The framers of the 25th Amendment understood that a rigid definition of incapacity would either capture too little or too much. Instead, they left the standard to political judgment — to be applied by those closest to the President and, in emergencies, by the constitutional body Congress has the power, but has never bothered, to establish. As Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, put it in April: “Section 4 of the 25th Amendment empowers Congress to establish a permanent ‘body’ that, with the concurrence of the Vice President, can declare that the President is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.’ Although the 25th Amendment was adopted more than 50 years ago, Congress never set up this body.”
The Legislators Making the Case
In April 2026, Rep. Raskin introduced legislation, co-sponsored by fifty House Democrats, to create precisely that body: an independent, bipartisan Commission on Presidential Capacity composed of physicians and former high-ranking executive-branch officials appointed by leaders of both parties. The bill’s stated grounds included the President’s recent threat, published on Truth Social, that “a whole civilization will die” if Iranian leadership did not accept his ceasefire terms — an ultimatum reportedly issued without congressional consultation.
“Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office,” Rep. Raskin wrote, “has dropped to unprecedented lows as he threatens to destroy entire civilizations, unleashes chaos in the Middle East while violating Congressional war powers, aggressively insults the Pope of the Catholic Church and sends out artistic renderings online likening himself to Jesus Christ.” Raskin was not alone. Over seventy Democrats and a handful of MAGA-aligned figures including commentator Candace Owens joined the call for the Cabinet to act, according to the Deseret News.
The Constitutional Argument
The 17th Amendment episode adds a specific evidentiary strand to that broader case. A president discharges the duties of his office by, among other things, respecting the constitutional order — including the elected composition of the co-equal branches of government. When the president holds bipartisan legislation hostage to force through an elections overhaul that the Senate has repeatedly declined to pass, when he attempts by executive order to accomplish what Congress will not, and when his House allies respond to Senate resistance by proposing to abolish the direct election of senators altogether, the question is no longer merely political. It becomes constitutional. A president who treats the elected Senate as an obstacle to be worked around, rather than as a co-equal branch to be persuaded, has arguably ceased to discharge the powers and duties of the office as the Framers understood them.
The Practical Barriers
Let us be honest about what stands in the way. Section 4 requires the Vice President’s concurrence, and Vice President J.D. Vance has shown no daylight from the president on questions of executive power. The Cabinet is composed of loyalists appointed on the promise of loyalty. And Raskin’s commission bill, while co-sponsored by fifty members, cannot become law in a Republican House and Senate over a certain presidential veto. The practical path to invocation is, at present, closed.
Why the Barriers Don’t Negate the Case
But the political impossibility of a remedy has never negated the constitutional case for one. The Framers of the 25th Amendment did not require that invocation be easy. They required only that it be available — and that the standard, “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” be capacious enough to reach the situations they could not foresee. This is one. When a president spends his term dismantling the elective mechanisms of the government he heads, the question of his fitness to lead that government is not partisan. It is the exact question the amendment was drafted to answer. That the answer cannot yet be delivered does not mean the question should not be asked.
7. What it would mean for the ordinary American
Strip away the constitutional language and consider what a repealed 17th Amendment means at the level of an ordinary voter. It means that when you go to the polls in a Senate election year, there is no Senate election. It means that the person representing your state in Washington was chosen by a group of state legislators, most of whom you did not vote for, in a chamber whose district maps were drawn to insulate the majority party from any statewide swing. It means that if your senator votes for a bill you hate — cuts to Medicare, or Social Security, or a war you did not want — you cannot vote her out. You can only lobby your statehouse to fire her, in which case a different faction of the same party will send you a new senator.
The consequence is, at the level of daily political life, a complete severance of the American voter from the upper chamber of the American legislature. Twenty-one million Americans currently lack easy access to citizenship documents, per the Brennan Center study cited by CNN; under the SAVE America Act many of them would lose the vote in federal elections. Under a repealed 17th Amendment, every American would lose the vote in Senate elections. The two policies together would not merely limit the electorate. They would redefine which offices are subject to it at all.
The functioning of Congress itself would shift accordingly. A Senate chosen by state legislatures would be beholden not to a statewide constituency but to a party caucus in the state capital. It would legislate accordingly. It would confirm judges accordingly. It would ratify treaties accordingly. The chamber the Framers designed to be the deliberative institution of the Republic — the “cooling saucer” of Jefferson’s famous metaphor — would become the coordinating body of whichever party controlled the most statehouses. Under current maps, that is the Republican Party, and it would be for a generation.
8. What it says about the leadership
A president who was serious about his oath would treat the 17th Amendment repeal effort, however unlikely its passage, as an attack on the constitutional order that he swore to defend. He would say so, publicly, in the same terms he used against flag-burning or the Confederate statue takedowns of a decade ago. He would call his House allies to the Oval Office and tell them, on the record, to withdraw the resolution. He would not permit the party over which he presides to treat American voting rights as a bargaining chip in a fight over a bill he happens to want passed.
He has done none of these things. He has instead spent the year escalating pressure on the same Senate his allies now propose to abolish, holding bipartisan bills hostage, threatening executive orders his own courts have blocked, and posting extemporaneously about civilizational annihilation in a foreign-policy dispute. The president’s silence on the 17th Amendment resolution is not neutral. It is a signal. And every state legislator in every red state who is watching that signal knows exactly what it means. Kansas is what it means.
This is not the behavior of a president discharging the powers and duties of his office. It is the behavior of a president discharging his powers against the office — treating the Constitution as an obstacle when it constrains him, and as a tool when it does not. That is the standard the 25th Amendment was written to reach. That is the standard fifty House Democrats have now formally invoked. And that is the standard against which this presidency, whatever its ultimate political fate, will eventually be measured.
Editorial Conclusion
The Seventeenth Amendment is not an obscure constitutional footnote. It is the single guarantee that a United States senator answers to the citizens of a state rather than to whichever party machine happens to control its statehouse. Its repeal — proposed openly by nine House Republicans and being previewed at the state level in Kansas — would end 113 years of direct democracy in the Senate and manufacture a Republican supermajority in the upper chamber that no future election could dislodge.
This is being pursued because the president wants an elections overhaul the elected Senate will not deliver, and his allies have concluded that the simpler answer is to replace the elected Senate. That is not conservatism. It is not federalism. It is not what the Founders wanted, and it is exactly what the Progressive Era Constitution amended away.
The stakes are not partisan. They are constitutional. Every American — Republican, Democrat and independent — has a stake in the ability to vote out a senator. To let that vote be taken away, quietly, in the noise of a House-Senate feud, would be to consent to the end of the Senate as an elected body. Congress must reject this resolution on the floor of the House. State legislatures must repudiate the Kansas model. And the Cabinet, the Vice President and the Congress must revisit whether a president who spends his term dismantling the elective mechanisms of his own government is discharging the powers and duties of the office he holds. The Framers left “unable” undefined so that this generation could answer that question. It is time to answer it.
Sources & References
- Democracy Docket · Kansas GOP scheme could cancel election in bid to weaken voters’ power to elect U.S. senators, June 25, 2026.
- Office of Rep. Keith Self · Congressman Keith Self Introduces Resolution to Repeal the 17th Amendment, June 25, 2026.
- Washington Examiner · Self proposes repealing 17th Amendment as House-Senate feud intensifies, June 2026.
- Newsweek · Full List of Republicans Pushing to End Direct Election of Senators, June 2026.
- ABC27 / WHTM · Scott Perry backs bill to let state lawmakers, not voters, elect U.S. senators, June 2026.
- Cecil Daily · Harris co-sponsors attempt to repeal 17th Amendment, June 2026.
- Plano Magazine · Plano congressman introduces resolution to repeal the 17th amendment, June 2026.
- National Archives · 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Direct Election of U.S. Senators (1913).
- National Constitution Center · Interpretation: The Seventeenth Amendment.
- Britannica · Seventeenth Amendment: Summary and Facts.
- MultiState · 2026 State Legislatures partisan control.
- Ballotpedia · State legislative elections, 2026 (trifecta counts).
- NPR · Trump keeps sabotaging legislation over the SAVE Act. Here’s what’s in it, June 25, 2026.
- CNBC · Trump vows legislative blockade until SAVE America voter-ID bill is passed, March 8, 2026.
- The Hill · Trump floats executive order on voter ID if SAVE Act stalls in Senate, February 2026.
- CNN Politics · What’s in the “SAVE America Act” and why is it so important to Donald Trump?, March 12, 2026.
- Center for American Progress · The SAVE Act May Be Stalled in Congress, But State Versions Are Being Advanced All Across the Country, June 2026.
- MS NOW / Steve Benen · Trump’s anti-voting bill is far more radical than just a “voter ID” proposal, June 26, 2026.
- Fox News · ‘As long as it takes’: Trump allies freeze House floor to pressure Senate on voter ID bill, June 2026.
- House Judiciary Democrats · Ranking Member Raskin Introduces Legislation Establishing Independent Commission on Presidential Capacity, April 14, 2026.
- The Hill · Rep. Jamie Raskin introduces bill to assess president’s fitness under 25th Amendment, April 14, 2026.
- MS NOW · Raskin offers bill setting up 25th Amendment process to remove Trump from office, April 14, 2026.
- Deseret News · Democrats want a medical check on Trump’s fitness for office, April 14, 2026.
- Constitution Annotated · Twenty-Fifth Amendment (full text).
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