I have an argument based on the wisdom of the founding fathers, who realized that written changes to the constitution or the law immediately result in efforts to ignore, avoid or evade them. So the solution must be for independent bodies of people with competing interests, who will continually vie with each other to prevent out of control government.
They set up the constitution to be filled with these balances. The one most people are familiar with is the balance of the three federal branches. But there are many others, including the balance between the federal government, the state governments, and the people.
The House of Representatives was meant to be the sole democratic body in the government. The Senate was to represent the interests of the states. The POTUS was to be selected by a college of electors, and the justices of the Supreme Court were to be nominated by the POTUS and approved by the Senate (and thus indirectly the states.)
The 16th Amendment terribly imbalanced this equation, by making US senators effectively “free agents”, who do not have to be responsive to their states. However, the senators themselves adore this amendment, because it gives them power without responsibility. So they would fight to the death any effort to repeal it.
This imbalance, however, is out of control and causing tremendous harm, so it must be restored in some way.
The way to do this is to create a new body, composed much like the original senate, except strictly tailored to be responsive to the state legislatures, *not* the people, and *not* the federal government.
The place to put this new body is not in congress, or the executive branch, but in the judiciary.
Right now, each year, the federal circuit courts send some 8,000 appeals to the Supreme Court, which can only hear a few dozen cases. It is a tremendous bottleneck in justice.
So the idea is to create a “Second Court of the United States”, superior to the federal circuit courts, but inferior to the Supreme Court. But while it hears cases from the federal courts, *it* is *not* a federal court.
It is composed of 100 appointed state judges, 2 from each state, appointed by a majority vote of their state legislature, which cannot be bound to vote in any way.
It is *not* a constitutional court, though it reviews the decisions about the constitutionality of appealed cases. It is a *jurisdictional* court, that after hearing the constitutional arguments, decides if the case rises to the level of a federal case, or if it should be returned to the states for a decision by their courts. That it is *not* federal business.
This means that this court can short circuit any number of federal judges efforts to enact new laws on their own. That the states can overrule these federal judges, if enough states agree to do so, and say “It is not your business.”
Importantly, cases *can* be appealed to the Supreme Court from the Second Court of the United States, but if a majority of Second Court judges, as representatives of their states, find against it, the Supreme Court can only overturn with exact constitutional text, *not* interpolations, extrapolations, or the decisions of other courts, judicial precedent, aka ‘stare decisis’.
If two thirds of the Second Court of the United States decide something, it is in effect saying that it has the authority of a called constitutional convention. And if three-fourths of the judges find in one way, it is a de facto constitutional change.
The other purpose of the Second Court of the United States would be as having original jurisdiction to all lawsuits between the federal government and the states. As it is now, such lawsuits must tediously go through a half dozen *federal* courts before making it to the Supreme Court. But the Second Court would mean that the *states* hear the case first, and decide who is in the right, that state or the federal government.
The bottom line to all of this is that the Second Court of the United States acts like a continual federal government pruning mechanism. Slowly, deliberately, and methodically trimming the federal government down to size, and forcing them back into their constitutional mold.
Without attempting to shortchange your idea, wouldn't a senate of the states prevent anti-10th Amendment lawyers from becoming judges in the first place? The outrageous court decisions we've had to live under began with FDR, when his popularity steamrolled the elected senate of the 1930s. State appointed senators could politically flip off presidents without fear.