Like the proverbial bad penny, bad ideas have a way of turning up again and again in the General Assembly.

A couple of years ago, I mentioned a bill by Sen. Frank Niceley that would have given Tennessee legislators the power to appoint Republican and Democratic candidates to the U.S. Senate. I called it pointless and noted that it would take power away from voters.

The bill got nowhere in committee, thank goodness.

Yet the concept is back, this time in the House, with a new sponsor: Rep. Susan Lynn from District 57, which includes Mount Juliet and part of Wilson County. I wondered about her reasoning, so I got in touch to ask why she filed the bill.

A bit of background here. For the first 120-plus years of this country, legislators chose the senators from each state, as prescribed in the Constitution.

The Senate website recounts that Roger Sherman, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention from Connecticut, “warned against placing too much power in the hands of the people, who ‘should have as little to do as may be about the Government. They lack information and are constantly liable to be misled.’”

Given the millions who are being misled – willingly, happily, gullibly being misled – in the current presidential contest, it’s easy to see Sherman’s point.

In any event, that changed with the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, putting Senate elections in the hands of state voters. (The 16th Amendment, ratified the same year, authorized a federal income tax. A big year for changes.)

Lynn, who responded by email and a telephone call, said the purpose of her bill is “to get back to what our Founders had originally intended.” She agreed that it is basically an effort to bypass the 17th Amendment, to the extent that it can be, since repealing it is a non-starter for many reasons.

“We’re taking a step back and attempting to restore what once was,” she says.

Much of the language in her bill comes from Niceley’s, Lynn says, with a significant difference: It would not take effect until the current senators leave office for one reason or another.

“In this way, we are not attacking or insulting our sitting officeholders,” she says. “We respect them and feel that they do an excellent job for us, and we do not want them to feel that this bill is a personal attack in any way.”

Legislative Republicans would choose their party’s Senate candidate, and Democrats theirs, with independents getting on the ballot in the usual way. Voters would have the final say from that lineup.

“They will still have their choice of Republican, Democrat or Independent that will be on the ballot, so they will have that choice,” Lynn says. “It’s just that this is more in line with what our Founding Fathers had originally established.”

That “original intent” line of reasoning is a recurring argument for conservatives, some of whom I suspect would be happy if they could roll back the calendar a century or more. I didn’t get that sense from Lynn, though she certainly has enthusiasm for this retro move.

“I have explained it to the people in my district,” she says. “Sometimes at first they say, ‘Why, what are you doing that for?’ When you explain it to them, they are in wholehearted support.”

“Honestly,” Lynn adds, “I hope this will be model legislation for the rest of the country.”

I don’t, and told her as much. That was fine with her. She was upbeat and engaging during our entire conversation, and I found myself wishing that her openness to political disagreement and dialogue could be reflected among more of her Republican colleagues. Some of them don’t take kindly to dissent, as we’ve seen demonstrated.

I also discovered, just before our talk, that there’s another House bill that would do basically the same thing, though the language is slightly different. It lacks the exemption Lynn’s bill extends to the current Senate officeholders, which could be a point of contention.

Her affability aside, Lynn didn’t sway me toward her thinking. (Niceley, she says, sponsors the Senate companion.) But she did prompt me to wonder, in a way she clearly did not intend: Could legislators manage to select a worse Senate candidate than Marsha Blackburn? It’s a scary thought.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.