The difficultly with any attempt to reform the Senate is that it has more Constitutional insulation than any other body. Article V states that "No state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate". Any attempt to balance out the Senate population wise (short of redrawing states, which has been suggested in this thread) would be borderline unconstitutional. It could be argued that Article V could be amended to remove that section, but I think that would be pretty radical and legally dubious. I would say such a maneuver would be unconstitutional, given that Article V deals with amendments so the intent was clearly to prevent the states from being deprived equal representation in the Senate. So, just from a legal standpoint, I think Senate reform would be an absolute nightmare that likely would precipitate a constitutional crisis.
Further, it must be remembered that the US is a federal republic, so it balances both the rights of its people and the rights of its constituent parts. Every voter is equal, and they are represented in the House, while every state is equal to any other state. A voter in Wyoming is equal to a voter in California, and the states they live in are in turn equal to one another. Hence, the voter in Texas and the voter in California are represented in the House, while their states are represented in the Senate. If we hand't moved to direct election of senators, this sort of divide would make more sense, and for that reason I think the 17th Amendment was a very poor idea.
I also know it sounds anachronistic now, but we need safeguards to protect the interests of the minority. That doesn't mean that the minority can rule, and in our system the majority will eventually prevail if its support is broad and deep enough, but we can't gut every institutional safeguard against the will of the majority simply because the minority is able to impede the agenda of the majority. The majority is not always on the side of justice or liberty, more often than not I think we can see that the majority is a greater threat to liberty than the minority. When Republicans have majorities in the country, they use the tools of the majority with unscrupulous zeal to pursue their ends, and so too do the Democrats. The beauty of the system is that, whoever is in the minority, has the institutional tools to resist this onslaught.
The idea that the states are equal units is fundamentally bogus. They are heavily out of wack population wise, and they make no sense whatsoever from a community of interest standpoint. The states simply are not equal communities of interest; some states lack a concise community of interest to them whatsoever, while others are a mesh up of many entirely different and fundamentally dissimilar communities of interests thrown together as 1.
