I mostly agree with you b_b. Has anyone else been literally capable of throwing a rock at someone at work without even standing up, yet officially if you want a response from them you have to communicate to your boss, they have to communicate to their boss, that boss communicates with a parallel position, it goes down the chain a few layers back to the person, then you are relaying through 10 people what could be said out loud in 5 seconds? I once communicated directly with someone at an organization and got reamed by the managerial roles for doing it rather than going through "official channels". I remember having a beer later with the guy I communicated directly to and it was clear it wasn't him complaining and that he was quite glad that I communicated to him directly, just the middle managers going berserk for no reason.

It's annoying and frustrating, just like sending messages through local officials before reaching your senators. Revoking the 17th amendment just leads to more unnecessary bureaucracy in government.

That being said, there is an issue with people not paying attention to local elections, but this proposed solution actually makes Senators turn into appointed positions like judges. As I was saying in my original post, I don't really consider appointed positions as representatives. If they can be considered representatives, those appointed positions also hire and fire employees underneath them (essentially the same as appointing), so technically the entire federal government and every employee would indirectly be "representatives" for us, which I think everyone can agree isn't really the case.

We definitely have a culture issue with focusing on federal elections pretty much exclusively, but I don't think any change in government would change that. People would still think the federal government was responsible for their political choice and just demand it goes to their Senator, get more frustrated, and cause more civil unrest and frustration with government.

I think the only way to solve the local/federal issue is through culture, but our culture seems to think the presidency is a dictator anyway with every president in the last 100 years spending time pushing legislation through Congress instead of exclusively being the head of the executive branch. I think people just think of the three branch system as separation of powers exclusively, and not separation of responsibility. What we need is a president who will STFU about what policies he/she will be pushing through Congress and have a real debate on what they want to do with the executive branch itself.

Some of that is difficult to achieve when the majority of the executive branch is clouded in secrecy even from legislators. Transparency in the executive branch is really a key thing we need to move this country forward, and every elected president that ran on a transparency platform has done the exact opposite (Obama comes to mind in particular here). Great, we have a way to petition the government for a response on something. That's not real transparency, and they can't even respond to all of the petitions that have gone past the threshold.

I think that might be a reason people want to vote for Trump as well. They think he'll "tell it like it is" and start explaining government, but in reality he's just going to make his public interactions a series of Twitter flame wars and the few times he actually attempts to explain what's going on in government he's just going to show his complete moronic idiocy on how things really work and botch the whole thing and mislead the public with false information. Unfortunately, we'll have no way to fact check him when he's talking about secretive procedures so when he says something we'll have no idea if he's telling the truth because his track record of telling the truth is spotty at best.

So the real solution is proposed best by Bill Burr: video

“They won’t just come out and say it. Nobody has the balls to say it. Look, 85 percent of you have to go. That’s it! That. Is. It. I have been bitching about the population problem for three specials in a row! Waiting, for some politician to have the balls to bring it up, but they won’t do it. We live in a democracy. A democracy. You can’t be honest in a democracy. You need the votes. You can’t run with that as your platform. Coming out there." He puts the mic in the stand and begins bellowing: "‘AND IF I’M ELECTED, I WOULD IMPLEMENT A PROGRAM TO IMMEDIATELY ELIMINATE AT LEAST 85 PERCENT OF YOU! THIS PLANET CANNOT SUSTAIN THE SHEER NUMBERS – LET ME FINISH! – THIS WILL NOT BE ARBITRARY. UNDER YOUR SEATS IS A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONNAIRE. IF YOU DID NOT BRING A PENCIL, YOU’RE ALREADY OUT! You can’t do that. You gotta be nice. You got to be fucking nice. Especially in this day and age, man. Everybody getting in trouble. All these god-damned groups out there bitch-moaning and complaining, and anytime anybody says anything – ‘You offended the group!’ – you’ve got to apologize.”