[familyop]

"I regard the states losing their sovereign identity to the federal government to be a consequence of post Civil War traumatic 'amnesia.'"

I'm not saying that states should be powerless, but we do have a problem with moral decline in every level of government, business and academia. Shoot, there was a time when communities, with the laws of states, would whip immoral troublemakers and send them back to Pennsylvania. ;-)

[Amendment10]

"I'm not saying that states should be powerless, but we do have a problem with moral decline in every level of government, […]"

Please bear in mind that the only specific power that the states have ever delegated to the feds, expressly via the Constitution, the specific power to regulate with respect to intrastate issues is the power to regulate the US Mail (1.8.7). Everthing else that the feds do concerning intrastate issues is based on 10th Amendment-protected state powers which the corrupt feds have stolen from the states.

Thomas Jefferson had expressed it this way …

"The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations." --Thomas Jefferson to Gideon Granger, 1800.

Again, the ill-conceived 17th Amendment is a large part of the unconstitutionally big federal government mess imo.