The 17th Amendment and the States

Texas Gov. Rick Perry apparently is one of the people who opposes the 17th Amendment, which shifted the election of Senators from a power of state legislatures to something handled by direct popular election in each state. Here's the quote:

I think the issue is about consolidating the power in Washington, D.C. The 17th Amendment is one of those where they were making... the states were historically more in control when they decided who those senators were going to be. They took the states out of the process at that particular point in time. So that’s the... uh... the historic concept of checks and balances, when you had the concept of the federal government and the states. The 17th Amendment is when the states started getting out of balance with the federal government, is my belief.

Now, see, he's not entirely wrong about this. It is indeed very possible that the switch to direct election of Senators created a political culture in the federal government that is less respectful of state power, and/or less reticent about using federal power, depending on your point of view. But what Perry glosses over entirely is why exactly this is a bad thing.

State legislatures have an institutional bias in favor of state power. After all, state power is their power, and people tend to like their own power. Specifically, state legislatures ought to be more fond of state power than the actual people of the United States. They're elected by that same electorate, and then have an institutional bias layered on top of that. I wouldn't say that choosing Senators through state legislatures is undemocratic, but it's certainly indirect, and the indirectness both introduces an element of pure random deviation from the public's wishes and adds a layer of institutional bias, which is mainly in favor of the power of state legislatures. If we remove that indirectness, and the bias that comes with it, then Senators in the aggregate will reflect the wishes of the people of the United States, on the issue of state power among other issues. So if Rick Perry wants us to give state legislatures their ability to introduce their own biases into the selection of Senators, he wants the government to be more friendly to states' rights than the people want. Now, certainly there are some reasons why governments should be biased away from the pure wishes of their people, for instance in favor of respecting the civil rights of minorities who tend to lose the political process. But I'd be curious to hear Perry's argument for why the proper balance of federal and state power is not the balance the American people favor.