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UNITED STATES v. MORRISON

Souter, J., dissenting

by relying on a priori deﬁnitions of state sovereignty,” id.,
at 548.

It concluded that

“the Framers chose to rely on a federal system in which
special restraints on federal power over the States in-
hered principally in the workings of the National Gov-
ernment itself, rather than in discrete limitations on the
objects of federal authority. State sovereign interests,
then, are more properly protected by procedural safe-
guards inherent in the structure of the federal system
than by judicially created limitations on federal power.”
Id., at 552.

The Garcia Court’s rejection of “judicially created limi-
tations” in favor of the intended reliance on national poli-
tics was all the more powerful owing to the Court’s explicit
recognition that in the centuries since the framing the rela-
tive powers of the two sovereign systems have markedly
changed. Nationwide economic integration is the norm,
the national political power has been augmented by its vast
revenues, and the power of the States has been drawn down
by the Seventeenth Amendment, eliminating selection of
senators by state legislature in favor of direct election.

The Garcia majority recognized that economic growth
and the burgeoning of federal revenue have not amended
the Constitution, which contains no circuit breaker to pre-
clude the political consequences of these developments. Nor
is there any justiﬁcation for attempts to nullify the natural
impact of the particular amendment that was
political
adopted. The signiﬁcance for state political power of ending
state legislative selection of senators was no secret in 1913,
and the amendment was approved despite public comment
on that very issue. Representative Franklin Bartlett, after
quoting Madison’s Federalist No. 62, as well as remarks by
George Mason and John Dickinson during the Constitu-
tional Convention, concluded, “It follows, therefore, that the