Maybe it comes from living in a few different ones (and living in a couple places with borders of sorts), but the older I get, the more I find the fixation on states to be sort of silly. Most contain so much diversity that they’re only loosely a unified idea of a place.
This is where my head is at.
Maybe we should understand that like the musket vs the machine gun, fixating on states' rights made sense when a state had 40,000 people in it. But if it has 10 million.....yeah, that's a big difference.
Obviously, on the national level, when anything is passed, it pisses off 150 million people.
Okay, so at the state level, it's pissing off millions of people.
If we simply rolled it back to fixating on counties' rights, it's pissing off fewer and fewer people. No, avoiding pissing people off isn't the most important thing, but it's and improvement from the vague to the specific. Just as state-by-state is from the vague to the specific compared to national policy.
I also see no reason for either side of the aisle to disagree with this. If you're obsessed with the tradition of fixating on state-by-state rights, that's fine. But in terms of making life easier for the minority of any population (both sides), it'd be a plus.
For AZ, its 3rd-largest county has the same population as the entire state did 100 years ago. While we all laud the constitution a good document, we also have to vary things as time passes.
When our country was formed, the biggest state was Virginia. There were no trains yet. No state had more than half a million people.
Maybe we should take a look at the 10th amendment and update it for the times of a massive country by land, by population, and by modernity.