Restoring federalism

“Federalism is a basic concept of American government, in which the states are not merely regional representatives of the federal government, but are granted independent powers and responsibilities.” -- definitions.uslegal.com

Distinctly different from a national government, a federal government presides over an association of states, each of which have their own government and laws and function independently from one another and from the federal government, as long as they are in compliance with the U.S. Constitution and federal laws. Having just broken free from a government that had absolute authority over them when they were colonies, the Framers of the Constitution were not about to create a central government that had little to no input from the people it was governing. The Tenth Amendment made clear that the authority of the federal government to dictate to individual states what they must do was very limited, and most of the responsibility of civil government rested in the states as well as in the people themselves: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

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Article V of the Constitution provides another means for keeping the federal government in check: “...on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, [Congress] shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which...shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States or by Conventions in three fourths thereof...” This means states have the power to bypass the House and Senate in order to bring necessary changes in our federal government. I propose one of the first Amendments to consider for this process would be to repeal the 17th Amendment, as proposed by Mark Levin in his new book, The Liberty Amendments. The 17th Amendment changed the method of electing U.S. Senators from being chosen by their state legislatures to one of direct election, effectively limiting the powers reserved for the states, as described in the Tenth Amendment. Levin describes the Framers intent in having state legislature’s choose Senators: “Providing the state governments with direct input in the national government was not only an essential check on the new federal government’s power, but also a means by which the states could influence congressional lawmaking, without stripping the federal government of its enumerated primacy over certain matters of governance.” As we seek to bring responsibility to the federal government by electing legislators who have the interests of people in mind rather than that of an overbearing federal bureaucracy, let us also consider making use of the Amendment Convention to do the same.