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Please, if you're going to copy and paste the work of someone else, at least include the author's name and other identifying source material.
The author left out what seems to be the core of his or her reasoning. The author's argument makes sense (though I don't agree with it) if you chart it out this way:
1) The original Constitution split the legislative branch into two houses; a House of Representatives, directly elected by individuals, and a Senate, in which each state was represented by two Senators chosen by the states.
2) The 17th Amendment, enacted for reasons that no one quite agrees on, gave the power to elect Senators to the public, in elections at large within the states.
3) This means that state governments no longer have a direct line to the Federal legislative process. State governments can no longer protect their interests, and they cannot count on their constitutents to know what is really going on and to put the "right" pressures on their Senators.
All of this is a problem only if you buy that #3, particularly the second sentence of #3, is a problem.
4) The U.S. Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Rehnquist, has undertaken a path of narrowly construing Federal legislative power under Article I of the Constitution to limit the sorts of things that Congress can make the States do.
Here's where the argument runs thin. Is the author proposing that a repeal of the 17th Amendment, giving the power to elect Senators back to the state governments, would change the Court's analysis of legitimate Congressional behavior? It seems from the start of the article that this is what the author is thinking about, but I think that is wrong.
What the author is really saying -- or so it appears to me -- is that the author would like states to have even more control given them than the Constitution provides even with the new trends in constitutional jurisprudence in the Supreme Court. For the author, the narrow interpretations of Federal power are not enough; the author wants to reinstate the structure of the system which put state governments in control of the Senate.
Pay careful attention to that. "State governments." State legislators would often prefer to make decisions on their own. They'd rather wield the power of government themselves, thank you very much. And that is what the author of the column wants. State-government controlled Senators would prevent a great number of federal bills from making their way through Congress. Where the federal Congress does not legislate, states are usually free to step in and make their own rules.
What's the problem with that? Well, the problem is that the United States is not as small as it used to be. "Huh?" What I mean is that you can no longer go through a day without doing something related to interstate activity. For example, what you're doing right now, reading this post, is interstate activity. The company that runs GreekChat is in New Jersey, but even if you're in New Jersey too, I wrote this in Colorado. Besides, the servers may or may not be in New Jersey.
Because the world is that much smaller, the role of the states in regulation is comparatively smaller. Oh, certainly there are lots of things that ought to be state-regulated. But at some point, in almost every realm of activity, we need consistent federal regulation (or, in unregulated realms, something to keep states' hands off) in order to make it easier for us to interact over state lines.
Sure, more complex and diverse state rules would mean more jobs for people like me, and it would sure be nice to be employed right now. But over the long run it would make life a lot harder for all of us trying to do business with -- or simply interact with -- people in different states. States have local interests that they want to protect at the expense of people in other states. We rely on the federal government to act to balance out those disparate interests, to try to make it possible for the country as a whole to be more productive. Maybe Washington is ineffective sometimes -- maybe even most of the time. But I don't see any reason to give more power to the states to protect their local interests.
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