How The Fall of States Rights Weakened Democracy In The United States

In a republic system the people elect representatives to perform the duties of government for them. Because each vote has an equal value a citizen's vote has more effect on determining who will represent them when the voter pool is small and less effect when it is large. In the United States you as a citizen therefore have more power to effect your local elections than the federal elections. Since this is so it is to your advantage to endow the lower levels of government with more power than the upper levels. Another advantage of more power at the local levels is that they are more informed about the situation that affects them and therefore better equipped with the knowledge to handle the situation. On the other hand the federal government has more resources to deal with developing situations. There is also need for a federal government in order to form a more perfect union.

These issues were taken into account when the U.S. Constitution was made the law of the land and federal system of government was set up with the federal government balanced against the State government. It was decided that one element of the federal government was to represents the state's rights to rule themselves. This element was the Senate and served as a second filter to laws passed by Congress as well as having other duties such as advice and consent to both political appointees, such as judges, and foreign treaties. All of these have one thing is common and that is reserving to the states the power to rule themselves as the tenth Amendment states.

Now everything appears to have been carefully thought out accept that the Senate does not perform the duty for which they were intended. Instead of protecting a states right to rule themselves they now represent political issues only and therefore fail to guard against the federal government taking power upon themselves that is by rights the states either by judicial decision, legislation, executive order, or treaty and thus weaken the ability of the individual American to control their own political environment.

My hypothesis is that in 1913 when Congress and the states got together and decided to amend the Constitution with two Amendments whose purpose was to strengthen the Federal Government that this imbalance occurred. The Sixteenth Amendment gave the federal government the financial power to influence the states and other nations. It also caused the states to be dependent on the federal government for a large part of their financial needs. The Seventeenth Amendment switched the method of electing Senators from appointment by the state legislatures to direct voting by the citizens of the state and thus removing the control of state government over the excesses of the federal government. Sadly both amendments ended up weakening the ability of Americans to rule themselves.