Think back to fourth-grade American history. We learned why the Articles of Confederation failed and why the Constitution replaced them. One major problem was that states struggled to trade with one another and often tried to protect local interests by taxing or restricting goods from other states.

That helps explain why the Constitutional Convention gave Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce in Article I.

The challenge to the machine-gun ban asks more than whether one statute survives. It asks whether the Constitution’s architecture still restrains power at all.

In grade school, the principle sounded straightforward enough. Two centuries of litigation have made it anything but. A basic question still hangs over the Commerce Clause: How much power does it actually give Congress?

Can Congress force you to buy health insurance? Can it stop you from growing wheat in your own garden to bake your own bread? Can it ban you from possessing a firearm?

Not buying a firearm, which plainly involves commerce. Not using one. Just possessing one.

And does the answer change if that firearm happens to be a machine gun?

In 1986, Congress made it illegal “for any person to transfer or possess a machine gun,” with narrow exceptions for military use and for machine guns lawfully possessed before the statute took effect. For everyone else, the ban is absolute.

One might expect Congress to have debated whether the Commerce Clause, or any other constitutional provision, gave legislators the power to ban mere possession of a machine gun. It did not. The only real justification for banning post-1986 machine guns came in a single House floor statement from Rep. William J. Hughes (D-N.J.), the amendment’s sponsor: “I do not know why anyone would object to the banning of machine guns.”

Hughes did not offer a constitutional justification. He simply assumed Congress had the power and never bothered to prove it.

In reality, Congress does not possess a general police power. It cannot create a comprehensive national criminal code simply because it wants to. That authority belongs chiefly to the states. Congress may enact criminal laws only when they rest on one of its few enumerated powers.

That’s the essence of federalism.

RELATED: Want a machine gun? These states might soon make buying one easier

JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP/Getty Images

So the real question remains: Does Congress have the power to prohibit mere possession of a machine gun, or does that authority remain with the states and the people?

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has confronted the question before, but it has never answered it.

In 1997, the full court, sitting en banc, split evenly in United States v. Kirk. Sixteen of the 17 judges participated, and the court divided straight down the middle. Half concluded that the machine-gun ban exceeded Congress’ Commerce Clause authority. Half disagreed. Because no majority emerged, the district court’s judgment was affirmed by default, and the written opinions carried no precedential force.

Three months later, the court faced the issue again in United States v. Knutson. This time, the panel included three judges who believed Congress did have the power to ban machine guns. They upheld the law. The full court stayed silent, and Knutson remains binding precedent.

Two months ago, Judge Don Willett raised the issue again in a nonbinding concurrence in United States v. Wilson. Willett expressed serious doubt that Congress has constitutional authority to prohibit mere possession of a firearm. He walked through the Supreme Court’s three recognized categories of Commerce Clause authority: the channels of interstate commerce, the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and activities that substantially affect interstate commerce. Mere possession of a firearm, he concluded, “fits uneasily within any of these categories.”

Willett’s observation gets to the heart of the problem.

If mere possession counts as interstate commerce, or as something Congress may regulate under the Commerce Clause, then federal power no longer has a meaningful limiting principle. Congress can regulate nearly anything, so long as some lawyer can imagine a downstream economic effect.

That is not constitutional government. It is federal power without a boundary.

Now, nearly three decades after Knutson, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Temple Gun Club are prepared to press the issue again. Temple Gun Club is made up of law-abiding citizens who want machine-gun ownership made lawful for their members. The organization is not talking about weapons bought on some national market. It is talking about firearms the members would build themselves by converting guns they already lawfully own, firearms that never entered the stream of interstate commerce.

This case is about more than just machine guns. It is about whether the Commerce Clause still has limits. If Congress may ban possession of an item that was never bought, never sold, never exchanged across state lines, and has no substantial effect on interstate commerce, then Congress can regulate virtually every aspect of human life.

RELATED: When good guys carry, killers lose — and the media looks away

Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/Denver Post/Getty Images

Willett made the point well in Wilson:

Far from viewing this sort of incremental, frog-boiling expansion of federal power as legitimate, the Founding generation saw it as the more insidious threat — a quiet, gradual erosion of liberty rather than a sudden seizure of it.

That’s right. The courts should return to first principles. They should revisit the machine-gun ban and ask the question Congress ducked in 1986: Does “regulate commerce” still mean something limited and intelligible, or has the phrase become a blank check for federal control?

The challenge to the machine-gun ban asks more than whether one statute survives. It asks whether the Constitution’s architecture still restrains power at all — or whether the 10th Amendment has been reduced to a historical footnote.

​Opinion & analysis, Machine gun, Ban, 1986 machine gun ban, Constitution, Commerce clause, Congress, Limited government, Possession, Federal lawsuit, Fifth circuit, Second amendment, Supreme court, William j. hughes, Police power, Federalism 

An illegal alien who’s been deported four times faces upgraded charges now that the elderly Air Force veteran he’s accused of shoving onto subway tracks in New York City earlier this month has died.

Bairon Posada-Hernandez — a Honduran national with 15 prior charges on his record — was initially charged with attempted murder in connection with the incident, the Department of Homeland Security said.

‘I hope he rots in hell.’

However, the New York Daily News, citing court records, reported that charges against the 34-year-old suspect were upgraded to murder Wednesday after the elderly victim who had been on life support recently passed away.

More from the Daily News:

Richard Williams, 83, was waiting on the downtown platform for the F and Q trains at the Lexington Ave.-63rd St. station when he was shoved onto the tracks around 11:30 a.m. on March 8. Moments before, the assailant had pushed a 30-year-old man standing next to Williams onto the tracks as well without saying a word, cops said.

Williams was rushed to New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell in critical condition, the paper said, adding that his eldest daughter said he wasn’t expected to survive.

“It doesn’t look good,” Debbie Williams told the Daily News from her father’s bedside. Richard Williams died on March 17, the paper said.

Police told the Daily News that the city’s medical examiner attributed Williams’ cause of death to multiple blunt-force injuries.

RELATED: ‘Heinous’ thug accused of shoving 83-year-old military vet onto NYC subway tracks was deported 4 times, charged 15 times: DHS

“I hope he rots in hell,” Debbie Williams said of the suspect, according to the paper.

Posada-Hernandez pleaded not guilty earlier this month; his arraignment on the new charges is scheduled for Monday, the paper said.

The suspect’s attorney Michael Papson told the Daily News his client “vehemently denies these allegations. He’s never been arrested in the state of New York — ever.”

However, Homeland Security Deputy Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis had a different take, calling Posada-Hernandez a “heinous” and “serial criminal” who “should never have been able to walk our streets and harm innocent Americans.”

More from DHS:

Posada-Hernandez first entered the country on January 2, 2008, and has been deported four different times, most recently in 2020. He entered illegally a fifth time at an unknown date and location.

The suspect has a lengthy criminal history, including 15 prior charges such as simple assault, domestic violence, obstruction of police, possession of a weapon, drug possession, and aggravated assault.

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​Crime, Bairon posada-hernandez, Department of homeland security, Richard williams, Air force vet, Elderly man, New york city, Subway, Shoved onto subway tracks, Murder charge, Illegal alien, Illegal immigration, Politics 

Buckle up, Boomers and Gen Xers, because I’m going to serve you up some nostalgia bait. Stop at the concession booth to pick up your complimentary rose-colored glasses, and don’t feel shy.

Generation X was born between 1965 and 1980. We are the last generation who experienced the real, physical world the way most humans have experienced it. We came along when generational transitions were gradual. We knew our Boomer parents’ music and movie stars, and we know our Silent Generation grandparents’ music and movie stars. As a kid, I knew who the Andrews Sisters were, and I could sing along because my grandmother played their records.

There will be Slant Six engines running in good health long after I’m dead, just as God intended.

Compare to today: The average Gen Z kid has no idea who Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Lucille Ball are. Starting with Millennials, a chasm opened up between generations. People a generation younger asked who some of the most world-famous stars were when they were working and alive just 20 years earlier.

With Gen Z it’s even starker. They were given digital poison in the form of smartphones in their tender years, and the entire cultural landscape fragmented into a billion bespoke Balkan states.

It’s hard to convince young people that some of the technologies from the bad old world of analog were actually superior to what we have today. They don’t believe that phone calls on copper wire were clear and never dropped (it’s true, though). Hilariously, they think film photography was always blurry and little better at capturing detail than an Impressionist painter.

Well, some of these things were better. And I want them back.

1. Kodachrome film

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

I trained as a photographer in college, and that was going to be my career. But then digital came along. I was in romantic love with the hands-on craft that was film photography. When computers took over, I packed it all away because I was in love with silver gelatin emulsions, not silicon chips.

The loss of Kodachrome color slide film was the worst, and I shed real tears when Kodak pulled the plug. There was no color film in history that reproduced color as well as Kodachrome did; there’s a reason Paul Simon wrote the song. He was right.

Kodachrome was actually a black-and-white film with no built-in dyes like all other color films. Instead it captured the blue, red, and green light on three layers in the film separately. The color dyes were added during the wet chemical processing, and those dyes were richer and more time-stable than ordinary color film. This is why a Kodachrome slide from the 1940s looks like a high-quality photograph taken today — there’s no fading or washed-out colors like many of us see in old color photos in our family albums.

It was also the sharpest film with the highest resolution. A scene taken on Kodachrome was reproduced in such detail that looking at the slide was nearly like looking at real life through a window.

Because you’re reading this on a computer screen, you and I can’t see what the slide “really” looks like. It’s mediated by an electronic screen. But you can still see the rich color and fine detail that no other film could achieve.

2. Three-strip Technicolor

People today talk about bright hues looking like “Technicolor,” but few people understand what that really meant. For decades in Hollywood, the patented Technicolor film process was different from every other color film technology, and it reined supreme. Motion pictures shot in Technicolor were brighter and more vivid than any other process. They made real life look like the Land of Oz.

The quality came at a price. Like Kodachrome, Technicolor used black-and-white film, adding stable, rich color dyes later during processing and printing. This made the shooting process difficult. The film was “slow,” requiring so much light on set that actors sometimes got eye damage. They certainly sweat a lot.

Technicolor cameras ran three separate strips of black-and-white motion picture film through the camera at the same time. A “beam splitter” separated the light into red, green, and blue, directing one color only to each of the three strips of film. The cameras were heavy and needed to be sound-baffled during a shoot.

Striking the final print for projection required precision machines that could line up each of the three strips of film in perfect registration to lay down cyan, yellow, and magenta dyes. It took precision-machining, skill, time, and money. That’s why the process was abandoned when cheaper, easier all-in-one color motion picture film became available.

But that’s also why the Technicolor process was so beloved that songs were written about it. This is from the Technicolor production “Silk Stockings” with Janis Paige singing to Fred Astaire.

3. Air-cooled Volkswagen engines

I went outside to play in 1978 and came upon my stepfather on his knees behind the 1967 beige VW bug that was our family car. “God — son of a *@^%!” he cussed as the engine cranked and cranked and wouldn’t fire up. He was trying to gap the points in the distributor, a job he was never good at. I learned to do it decades later from a classic butch lesbian, and it didn’t seem that hard to me.

My stepdad was doing this because that’s what normal people did in those days. You tuned up your own car. Most dads had a toolset and the know-how to do car maintenance at home. Repairs were less expensive, and you didn’t have to have a computer technician “scan” your engine to figure out what the bloody computer thought was wrong with it.

Sure, the old VWs were simple and had few features. The heaters were so bad that winter driving required an ice scraper for the inside of the windscreen. The bugs were tiny compared to modern cars, but you could get a surprising amount in there if you were clever.

Sure, they were light (some people call them death traps), but that was great when my mother went off a snowy road in Upstate New York, and four boys from the local college fraternity just picked it up out of the ditch and set it back on the road.

I’d give anything to hear that musical, metallic tinkle of the exhaust pipes on America’s roads today.

4. The Chrysler Slant Six engine

If you know, you know. America never built a more durable engine than the famous Chrysler Slant Six. The engine got its name because the designers tilted it 30 degrees to fit the block under the lower, sleeker hoods that became stylish in the early 1960s.

This six-cylinder may not have had the raw horsepower of a big block V8, but it produced a surprising amount of oomph for its size, and it was an engine that never died. If you’ve owned one, you can hear the sewing machine-like purr and tick in your mind.

We had two Slant Six-powered family cars growing up. As an adult, I’ve had a Dodge Dart and a Plymouth Belvedere powered by this motor. There’s no better way to spend an afternoon than adjusting the valves on a Slant Six while it’s running. I miss how easy it was to work on these engines, made in the days when you could move around under the hood and adjust something without taking off 15 components just to get enough room to put a finger in the engine bay.

There will be Slant Six engines running in good health long after I’m dead, just as God intended.

RELATED: My 1966 Plymouth Belvedere let her 225 Slant-6 do the talking

NBC/Getty Images

5. Customer service

This is a social technology that needs to make a comeback. My first jobs as a teenager were running the cash register at a Wegman’s grocery store and bringing burgers to tables at a Big Boy restaurant. Friendly, efficient customer service was mandatory. It was expected by every customer and every employer.

You were to greet customers with a friendly hello and an offer to help. Smiles were either compulsory or strongly encouraged. If a customer needed to find an item, you found it for them and walked them over to the right aisle.

What do you get today when you walk into any retail store? Dead-eyed, silent stares from any staff younger than 35. Need to find a pipe fitting in a big store like Lowe’s? Try asking. You’ll get, “Um … a what? If we had any, they’d be, like, over there,” as “Jonas” waves in a northeasterly direction.

Surprisingly, a young clerk at my local McDonald’s reminded me of the good old days of customer service last week. Like so many places, McDonald’s is making its restaurants hostile to humans. In addition to the ugly, gray, brutalist “updated” architecture, the lobbies are crammed with touch-screen kiosks, while the staffed registers have been reduced to one or two maximum. As recently as 15 years ago, McDonald’s had a reputation for employing staff that were neater, tidier, and friendlier than the competition.

That’s gone now — except for this one young man at my local McD’s. I walked past the kiosks and up to the register, expecting to be ignored for five minutes as is now McDonald’s standard. “Jeff” was about 22. His shirt was tucked in. He was neatly groomed. He smiled at me and said, “Welcome to McDonald’s; how are you today?” He meant it. He was looking me in the eye. I was so pleasantly surprised I thought I was dreaming, and I made a point to thank him for being human and polite.

The other day, I saw this old early ’80s commercial for McDonald’s Shamrock Shake. Take a look, and try not to tear up. If you’re 35 or under, you probably think the chipper and upbeat tone looks “fake.” You may not believe anyone ever acted that way. You might even find this level of cheer “cringe.”

Well, it was like that. I was there. And I want it back.

​Generation x, Kodachrome, Lifestyle, Culture, Technicolor, Chrysler slant six, Cars, Nostalgia, Customer service, Mcdonald’s, Intervention 

America’s newest political battlefield runs through one of the most miserable places in the country: the airport.

Democrats have held up funding for the Department of Homeland Security amid their ongoing war over ICE, and after a month without pay, TSA employees have started refusing to come to work. The result has been crippling delays at major airports, with waits stretching four hours or more and turning an already degraded flying experience into something closer to a public humiliation ritual.

The GOP theoretically holds the levers of power, but in practice it remains terrified of disturbing the status quo.

The brutal truth is that one political party is willing to disrupt travel across the country to protect illegal immigrants and preserve a future voter pipeline. Even after assassination attempts, lawfare against political opponents, and an open push for demographic replacement, conservatives still hesitate to admit that our political battles have become existential.

In theory, the United States remains the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. In practice, basic air travel now is a dysfunctional disaster. Seats are cramped, service is miserable, fellow passengers are often feral, and airlines charge extra for every scrap of convenience in the hope of squeezing one last dollar from exhausted travelers.

For a while, the indignity at least purchased speed. Flying still got you from one place to another faster than anything else. But incompetence, cost-cutting, and crumbling infrastructure have made significant delays routine. Travelers now regularly build an extra day into both ends of a trip because same-day arrival has become an increasingly reckless assumption.

Adding four-hour TSA lines to that ordeal is more than just another inconvenience. It’s simply insulting.

To his credit, President Trump has moved ICE officers into airports to assist with screening. It is less satisfying than watching those officers execute deportation raids, but early signs suggest the move has worked. Atlanta reportedly went from nearly five hours of screening delays to roughly five minutes. ICE officers appear to be in good spirits, and the agency itself seems to be recovering some badly needed public goodwill. Tom Homan has even said ICE agents will continue deportation operations while helping with TSA duties. It is not an ideal arrangement, but Trump has once again found a way to turn executive action into a political win.

RELATED: The right’s only way out of podcast chaos is radical honesty

Blaze Media Illustration

Still, the TSA mess raises a larger strategic question, one that extends well beyond airports.

During the COVID lockdowns, public schools across the country shut their doors. Conservatives had spent years correctly describing government education as a progressive propaganda machine and a patronage network for Democratic clients. Yet when the system buckled, the right did not use the opening to challenge the legitimacy of the whole structure. Republicans begged for schools to reopen as quickly as possible. Faced with a rare chance to dismantle an atrocious institution, conservatives instead demanded a “return to normal.” But normal was already a disaster.

The same pattern now applies to the TSA.

The agency did not even exist before 2001, and it has performed badly almost from the start. Most contraband still gets through screening. The TSA has not stopped a single terrorist attack. Like the public school system, it functions largely as a jobs program for Democrat clients while draining billions from taxpayers and making ordinary life demonstrably worse.

Republicans still act as though enduring a few nasty New York Times editorials is too high a price to pay to save the country.

Rather than using this crisis to argue for dismantling the TSA, Republicans have rushed to prove that it is indispensable. The short-term political benefit is obvious enough. No administration wants to own airport chaos. But every such rescue reinforces a deeper assumption shared by both parties: Any government program, once created, becomes permanent. No one is going to vote himself into a smaller state. The incentives do not allow it. America is far more likely to watch the regime collapse than to see it willingly scale itself back.

That failure of imagination points to a larger problem.

Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the presidency while holding a friendly Supreme Court, yet they still appear terrified to govern. Only Trump, in his early burst of executive orders, showed much appetite for using the moment. Even that momentum slowed once the administration ran into the courts and Congress refused to codify any serious part of the MAGA agenda. The GOP theoretically holds the levers of power, but in practice it remains terrified of disturbing the status quo.

RELATED: The taboo conservatives refuse to confront

Blaze Media Illustration

Democrats behave very differently. Even from a minority position, they are willing to shut down travel across the country for the explicit purpose of keeping illegal immigrants here. Members of the Democratic Party understand that their coalition depends on dissolving the old American nation and distributing its assets to clients in exchange for votes. That agenda is not particularly popular with the historic American population, but it is attractive to new arrivals who did not build the country and feel no inherited obligation toward it.

To remain electorally viable, Democrats need an ever-expanding pool of imported voters dependent on public wealth transfers to cancel out the votes of the native population. If they can replace enough of the country, they can govern it indefinitely. Progressives celebrate that possibility whenever they are not dismissing it as a conspiracy theory.

If one party is willing to grind national air travel to a halt to preserve its electoral advantage while the other will not pass basic legislation for fear of offending someone, the country has a big problem. Trump has pressed Congress to pass the SAVE America Act to strengthen election integrity and give Republicans a tactical advantage, yet the GOP continues to drag its feet. One party behaves as if politics actually matters. The other behaves as if politics is an embarrassing chore.

Democrats are willing to hold the nation hostage in airport security lines to secure victory. Republicans still act as though enduring a few nasty New York Times editorials is too high a price to pay to save the country. A movement that fears bad press more than national dispossession has surrendered the habits of self-government and forgotten what political power is for.

​Tsa, Air travel, Tsa lines, Gop, Airports, Democrats, Trump, Ice, Covid, Maga, Opinion & analysis, Demographics, Government shutdown, Congress, Mass deportations, Illegal immigration, Immigration and customs enforcement, Illegal aliens