1913 was certainly the beginning year of America's decline into whatever we've evolved into today, mostly a state of corruption of the upper echelon, and the Sodom and Gomorrah type society we have been promulgating. IOW, we are fast going down the tubes towards hell.  And to think it started with the gubmint - the very foundation set up to protect us.  The founding father's certainly didn't have this in mind, I'm sure.  But we've evolved into a divided society and nothing can turn it around, I fear.  We now need to be protected from ourselves. 

Clearly, the bargain, honorably entered into by the Founders' generation, was broken.  It was broken by the 17th Amendment, which instituted the direct election of U.S. senators.  That amendment struck directly at the heart of the Founders' design.  According to the original Constitution, senators were chosen by the state legislators.  Unlike the members of the House, who represent the people of their district, the senators had a special responsibility to represent their states in the deliberations having to do with the those "few and defined" powers the Constitution transferred from the states to the federal government.  That is why the states with small populations and the states with larger populations got the same number of senators and the same number of votes in the Senate.  It is also why the Constitution gives the Senate power over treaties and over the appointment of the senior officials of the executive, those whose responsibilities include "war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce."  The 17th Amendment eliminated the fundamental electoral guarantee of the Founders' vision of a federal government with limited powers.

The system we have today bypasses the state legislatures.  The consequences have been many and profound.  Probably the most obvious has been the inevitable erosion of the independence of the states and of their ability to counterbalance federal power.  The Senate was a barrier to the passage of federal laws infringing on the powers reserved to state governments, but senators abandoned that responsibility under the incentives of the new system of election.  Because the states no longer have a powerful standing body representing their interests within the central government, the power of the central government has rapidly grown at the expense of the states.  The states increasingly are relegated to functioning as administrative units of today's gargantuan central government.  The Tenth Amendment has become in our time a dead letter:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/09/1913_the_turning_point.html