How can the interests of the individual states be protected?

The only good way to protect the interests of the individual states is by political action.  Those who want to protect the states’ interests have to create interest groups and/or social movements to fight for those interests. They have to vote for politicians who will protect those interests.  There is no other way to make this happen.

In the United States, we have a federal system in which the states are supposed to have extensive rights.  Over time, however, the federal government has taken more and more power for itself.  This has happened even though there have been no constitutional amendments to change the balance of power between the federal government and the state governments.  Instead, the balance has changed simply because political leaders and regular citizens have allowed it to.

If the balance of power in our federal system has changed without any changes to the Constitution, that means that the balance is not determined by the Constitution.  Therefore, we cannot change the balance by changing the Constitution.  If the balance has changed because people wanted it to, we have to create a situation where people want the balance to change back.  That is, we have to get people to want the states to have more power again.  In order to do this, we would need political action.

We have seen that political action can get people to change their minds on various issues.  Perhaps the clearest example of this in recent times is the issue of gay rights.  Without changing the Constitution, we have gone from a time when gay sexual activity could be a crime to a time where gay marriage is protected by the Supreme Court.  This has happened in the space of less than 15 years.  What this tells us is that political action can be relevant.

To protect the interests of individual states, we would have to have a movement similar to the gay rights movement.  We would have to have interest groups pushing for states’ rights.  We would have to have them educating and persuading people that states’ rights are important.  We would have to have them working to elect leaders who would protect states’ rights.  This sort of political action is the only way in which the interests of individual states can be protected.