The states no longer had a legislative venue, or any venue, to influence directly the course of the federal government. This contributed significantly to the dismantlement of the states’ traditional and exclusive areas of governing responsibility. As a result, today the federal government fills whatever areas of governance and even society it chooses. State sovereignty exists mostly at the will of the federal government. The federal government’s limited nature under the Constitution was transmuted into the kind of centralized power structure the Framers worked so diligently to thwart.
