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Cite as: 529 U. S. 598 (2000)

651

Souter, J., dissenting

framers of the Constitution, were they present in this House
to-day, would inevitably regard this resolution as a most
direct blow at the doctrine of State’s rights and at the integ-
rity of the State sovereignties; for if you once deprive a State
as a collective organism of all share in the General Govern-
ment, you annihilate its federative importance.” 26 Cong.
Rec. 7774 (1894). Massachusetts Senator George Hoar like-
wise defended indirect election of the Senate as “a great se-
curity for the rights of the States.” S. Doc. No. 232, 59th
Cong., 1st Sess., 21 (1906). And Elihu Root warned that
if the selection of senators should be taken from state leg-
islatures, “the tide that now sets toward the Federal Gov-
46 Cong. Rec.
ernment will swell in volume and power.”
2243 (1911).
“The time will come,” he continued, “when
the Government of the United States will be driven to
the exercise of more arbitrary and unconsidered power, will
be driven to greater concentration, will be driven to extend
its functions into the internal affairs of the States.”
Ibid.
See generally Rossum, The Irony of Constitutional Democ-
racy: Federalism, the Supreme Court, and the Seventeenth
Amendment, 36 San Diego L. Rev. 671, 712–714 (1999) (not-
ing federalism-based objections to the Seventeenth Amend-
ment). These warnings did not kill the proposal; the
Amendment was ratiﬁed, and today it is only the ratiﬁcation,
not the predictions, which this Court can legitimately heed.19

19 The majority tries to deﬂect the objection that it blocks an intended
political process by explaining that the Framers intended politics to set
the federal balance only within the sphere of permissible commerce leg-
islation, whereas we are looking to politics to deﬁne that sphere (in der-
ogation even of Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803)), ante, at 616.
But we all accept the view that politics is the arbiter of state interests
only within the realm of legitimate congressional action under the com-
merce power. Neither Madison nor Wilson nor Marshall, nor the Jones &
Laughlin, Darby, Wickard, or Garcia Courts, suggested that politics de-
ﬁnes the commerce power. Nor do we, even though we recognize that
the conditions of the contemporary world result in a vastly greater sphere