Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

A federal appeals court voted to rehear a constitutional challenge to a federal law that prevents felons from possessing guns, weeks after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said he hoped a lower court would consider the law’s constitutionality.

The July 20 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit came after a three-judge panel of the same circuit on June 2 denied convicted drug trafficker Curtis Squire’s challenge to Section 922(g)(1) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code. The felon-in-possession provision is part of the federal Gun Control Act of 1968.

Federal gun laws have largely been justified under the Constitution’s commerce clause. The legal theory is that guns move in interstate commerce, meaning they are manufactured, sold, and transported across state lines. This means Congress can regulate gun possession, even inside the home, because it supposedly has an impact on the national market for firearms.

A majority of the judges sitting on the Fifth Circuit voted to grant the petition of Squire for a so-called en banc hearing before the full court. The panel had unanimously upheld Squire’s conviction and sentence on June 2 for being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Squire had filed a so-called as-applied challenge to Section 922(g)(1), arguing the provision was unconstitutional as applied to him under the Second Amendment.

He cited the Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. That decision recognized a constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense and held that restrictions on guns must be deeply rooted in American history if they are to survive constitutional scrutiny.

Squire argued the Second Amendment allowed him to possess a firearm in his home, so the onus was on the government to prove there was a historical tradition justifying a lifetime ban on someone with his criminal past.

He also cited the high court’s 2024 ruling in United States v. Rahimi, in which the justices upheld a federal gun control law that bars people under domestic violence-related restraining orders from possessing firearms.

The justices found in that case that the Second Amendment isn’t violated when an individual is disarmed after a court has found him to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another.

Squire argued that precedent stands for the principle that the disarmament must be related to a specific finding that a person is dangerous and that he was not because he was not convicted of using violence. His position was that Section 922(g)(1) was a categorical ban that did not mandate an ongoing assessment of dangerousness, so it was overbroad when applied to him.

The panel rejected these arguments, saying it affirmed the conviction and sentence “because our historical tradition supports disarming drug traffickers based on their dangerousness.”

The Fifth Circuit did not provide an explanation for its new ruling that sets aside the panel’s decision, but Circuit Judge Stephen Higginson noted in his dissent that mere weeks ago, Thomas “asked lower courts to reexamine the constitutionality of [the legal provision] under the Commerce Clause.”

“Already, our court answers the call,” Higginson said.

The judge was referring to Thomas’s concurring opinion on June 18 in United States v. Hemani, a case in which the high court ruled unanimously that the government may not prosecute a man for owning a firearm just because he has habitually smoked marijuana. The ruling clarified a provision of the Gun Control Act.

Thomas agreed that the drug user ban as applied should be struck down but warned that Section 922(g) provisions – including the felon ban – may exceed Congress’s authority under the commerce clause.

Thomas said Section 922(g)(3) of the Gun Control Act, which bars illegal drug users from possessing firearms, “appears to exceed Congress’s enumerated powers to regulate interstate commerce.”

“As an original matter, the Commerce Clause authorizes Congress only ‘to regulate the buying and selling of goods and services trafficked across state lines,'” he said.

The clause does not give Congress power to regulate “activities wholly separated from business, such as gun possession,” he said.

“Congress cannot regulate the possession of every thing that ever traveled across state lines,” Thomas added.

It is unclear when the Fifth Circuit will conduct the rehearing.

Authored by David Stockman via the Brownstone Institute,

Here’s a graph the Keynesians, statists, and Wall Street gamblers – yes, we repeat ourselves – would prefer not to explain. At the same time, it also explains why socialism at this late date in history – and after all its abysmal failures the world over – is having some kind of dubious second coming in America.

During the last three decades the national savings rate (red line) has essentially collapsed, having fallen from 6.3% of GDP in 1997 to 0.5% of GDP in 2025. Between the same two dates, however, the net worth of US households (blue line) has soared from 4.6X personal income to 6.5X personal income.

In economist jargon, the question would recur as follows: How in the world over a three-decade period did the stock of wealth soar when the flows of savings virtually evaporated?

Or in plain English, how did so many Americans get so damn rich while living high on the hog? And we do mean wealthy: According to the Fed’s Flow of Funds data, household net worth erupted from $32 trillion in 1997 to $169 trillion at present. These figures amount to an average of $320,000 per household in 1997, which grew to an average of $1.250 million per household 28 years later.

Needless to say, some substantial part of that gain is reflective of inflation. But even in constant 2025 dollars, average net worth per household has virtually doubled from about $630,000 to the aforementioned $1.250 million.

In short, the average savings per household diminished to nearly zero over that three-decade period – even as $85 trillion in added wealth accumulated in household balance sheets.

As it happened, of course, the massive $136.4 trillion increase in net worth over this period went to the holders of financial and housing assets, less associated debts. Accordingly, with a lot of debt at the bottom income rungs relative to modest asset levels, the resulting wealth distribution skewed sharply to the tippy-top of the economic ladder.

To wit, $44.1 trillion of the gain was accounted for by the top 1% of households and fully $94.2 trillion by the top 10%. And while Keynesians, statists, and stockbrokers would have you believe this was nothing more than Mr. Market at work, we beg to differ.

Under a regime of sound money and honest markets there would have been no soaring gains in net worth relative to the very modest gains in national income and savings. To the contrary, the former is the work of the money-printers at the central bank and the Cantillon Effect of monetary inflation.

That is to say, when the Fed prints money it effectively first deposits the receipts among the primary bond dealers, which sell government bonds to its open market desk and then send the proceeds ricocheting through the canyons of Wall Street. At length, the inflation gets to Main Street in the form of higher energy, food, and other everyday prices, but not before much of the inflation is absorbed by the leveraged gamblers on Wall Street.

So there is no mystery as to why the wealth distribution in America has been skewed sharply to the top of the ladder during recent years. The culprit was not the Reagan tax cuts back in the 1980s or the inherent inequality of capitalism.

To the contrary, the normal skew of wealth to the most productive, capable, persistent, and enterprising households has been badly thrown out of kilter by the capture of the Federal Reserve by Wall Street speculators.

In the interim, however, the chart below speaks for itself. By embracing Greenspan-style monetary central planning in lieu of gold standard sound money, the modern day GOP has paved the way for the emerging Mamdani socialist coup in the Democrat Party.

That is to say, the wealth disparities shown below did not exist with nearly this much skew as recently as 1987, when Alan Greenspan’s pro-inflation, pro-wealth effects regime became official policy at the Fed. Then again, the Fed’s balance sheet stood at $250 billion in Q2 1987 after 73 years of a moderately tame printing press, which footings then ballooned to nearly $9 trillion by the peak in Q1 2022.

Yes, flood the free market with $8.75 trillion of fiat credits in barely 25 years, and you will indeed get a rip-roaring financial asset inflation. And you will also get a rekindling of socialist economics, which should have been finally left for dead by 1984.

Let’s start with the axiomatic. Redistribution of wealth from rich to poor is none of the state’s business. Full stop. At the same time, however, it’s an equally grave sin for agencies of the state to artificially tilt the scales on behalf of the already rich. Yet that is unmistakably the consequence of Keynesian monetary policy as it has been practiced and amplified since the arrival of Alan Greenspan at the Fed in August 1987.

In this context, there is no reason to believe that the wealthy were getting shortchanged on the net worth front after the Morning in America boom of the mid-1980s. Yet as is evident in the graph below, the gap between the very rich and the bottom 50% of households has been relentlessly expanding since Greenspan bailed out Wall Street gamblers the first time after Black Monday in October 1987.

The net worth of the top 0.1% of households back then stood at $1.757 trillion, which was 2.4X the $718 billion net worth of the bottom 50% of US households. In unit terms, that amounted to an average net worth of $15,460 among the bottom 50% of households, which compared to $18.892 million for the top 0.1% of households.

Call this the status quo ante and there was no reason to find it objectionable. Mr. Market at work, as it were.

Fast forward to 2025, however, and the wealth distribution is far, far more skewed. The net worth of the top 0.1% or 135,000 ultra-wealthy US households now stood at $25.072 trillion, which compared to aggregated net worth of $4.266 trillion among the 67.4 million households in the bottom 50%.

That is to say, the gap had widened from 2.4X in 1989 to 5.9X by 2025. And this widening was even more dramatic when expressed in per household terms, where net worth now stood at $185.7 million each among the top 0.1% of households compared to $63,300 for the bottom 50%.

The truth is, there is absolutely no reason to believe that under a regime of sound money and honest financial markets that the gap between the tippy-top and bottom half of American households would have doubled during that interval. Not even remotely for the reasons we amplify below.

To the contrary, what we have is the Cantillon Effect: The inflationary emissions from the Eccles Building stick to the walls earlier and more completely on Wall Street and among financial asset holders before they eventually wend their way into the incomes and spending levels of the Main Street population.

There is no mystery, however, as to how the central banking branch of the state managed to double the wealth gap between the ultra-rich and the bottom 50% of US households in barely 37 years. Keynesian central banking has just a single policy instrument and it inherently makes the asset rich richer.

It can be succinctly described as systematic falsification of the price of debt or what economists are pleased to call “financial repression.” It is axiomatic, in fact, that when bond yields are artificially pushed lower, asset prices get jacked higher – even as leveraged speculation becomes even more rewarding as a matter of sheer arithmetic.

So what you have is a central bank-enabled double-whammy for the age-old carry trade: Through massive bond-buying, pegging of overnight money market rates, and open-mouth steering of price action on Wall Street, the Fed artificially boosts the asset side of the ledger – even as the carry cost of highly leveraged ownership of these appreciating assets falls increasingly below risk-based free market rates.

That is to say, the reason the net worth of the top 0.1% rose by 14.3X – from $1.757 trillion to $25.072 trillion – over a 36-year period in which the national income (GDP) rose by only 5.6X is this: Owing to a lot of help from their friends in the Eccles Building wealthy asset holders have been shooting fish in a barrel for the better part of three decades.

This has manifested itself, of course, in the relentless rise of PE multiples since the 1970s. Indeed, the S&P 500 traded at about 11X trailing GAAP earnings in the late 1970s, which multiple has climbed steadily on a rolling three-year trend basis to nearly 30X at present (dotted red least squares trend).

Then again, the logical direction of the trend line above would be the opposite – from the upper left to the lower right. That’s because the underlying performance trend of the US economy has sharply deteriorated over the past four decades.

Thus, the trend of the three-year rolling average of real GDP has been moving decisively counter to the upward trend of valuation multiples. From a trend rate of 3.5% per annum in the late 1970s the real GDP growth trend has marched downhill for 40 years, currently posting at barely 2.0% per annum.

To be sure, in shorter intervals the profits share of GDP can fluctuate and potentially trend higher. But over time the real economy has to expand in order for business activity and the profit offtake from it to rise, as well.

Alas, the valuation multiple trend above is just plain not compatible in economic terms with the steadily falling rate of US economic performance depicted below. Somebody had their big fat thumbs on the scale, and that was the debt-enabling money-printers at the nation’s central bank.

Yes, it is that simple. Like the case of the Wizard of Oz, the only thing behind the screens at the Eccles Building is the stimulation of debt, more debt, and still even more debt. And the reason remains the tattered Great Depression-era fallacy that times were hard because consumers and businesses suddenly lost their nerve and their minds, apparently, and refused to spend enough on consumer goods and capital goods to keep the macr0 economy on an expansionary path.

So economic policy-makers ever since, and one way or another through a variety of fiscal and monetary “stimulus” expedients, have sought to goose spending by fostering cheaper and more abundant debt than the free market would generate on its own steam.

This cardinal (Keynesian) error of modern economic policy has had a Brobdingnagian impact on financial markets and the Main Street economy alike.

That’s because the other key line on the graph also has been chugging relentlessly uphill – most especially after Nixon shit-canned sound gold-backed money at Camp David in August 1971. We are referring to the trend of the national leverage ratio, which is depicted by the least squares line (dotted red line) in the graph below. It could not be more dispositive.

From a historic ratio of below 1.5X national income in 1955, total public and private debt outstanding now sits at an aberrant and unprecedented 3.5X national income.

Those two turns of extra debt tell you everything you need to know about today’s massive central bank-fostered financial bubbles. At the historically stable and prosperity-compatible 1.5X ratio to national income, combined public and private debt outstanding today would total just $48 trillion.

As it happens, of course, that figure was actually $116 trillion at the end of Q1 2026. What we have, therefore, is an extra $70 trillion of debt freighting down the US economy at a level never before even imagined. In turn, this comprises the flood of mispriced debt that sent Wall Street into a relentless frenzy of leveraged speculation.

From endless basis trades to triple-leveraged ETFs and every manner of inherently leveraged options trading schemes, Wall Street has driven financial asset prices ever higher. But these pyramids of speculation and debt are not based on sustainable value-added and real economic output – they are the fetid fruit of the central bank printing presses.

Here’s the skunk on the woodpile, however. None of the massive buildup of leverage and $70 trillion of extra debt depicted above was necessary for prosperity. It made the wealthy unspeakably rich – perhaps symbolized by trillionaire Elon Musk – but it was built on the so-called “Greenspan wealth effect” doctrine, surely the greatest economic policy error of modern times.

And now it threatens the very basis of American democracy, as well. That’s because it is generating such egregious wealth disparities as to actually revive what had been the dead-as-a-doornail carcass of socialism at the turn of the century.

Using the 1955 Golden Era’s ratio of total public and private debt to national income (GDP) at 1.4X, here is the buildup of the current $70 trillion of excess debt now hanging like a financial sword of Damocles over the financial markets and US economy.

Indeed, this data makes clear that the main thing being cooked up behind the screen by the monetary wizards at the Eccles Building – especially since Greenspan’s arrival – was the false elixir of debt, more debt, and still even more debt. After all, during the 70 years after 1955 total US public and private debt outstanding rose by a staggering 190X, from $600 billion to $113.6 trillion.

And, yes, there was a fair amount of economic growth and an even more fulsome inflation of the price level during that seven-decade interval. But, still, the debt growth far outpaced both of these macr0 drivers, thereby causing the national leverage ratio – or ratio of total public and private debt to nominal GDP – to rise from 141% in 1955 to 370% at present.

In a word, the legacy of activist central banking since the mid-1960s has been the saddling of American free enterprise with what amounts to a rolling and perpetual national LBO. And like in all leveraged buyouts, it is the existing shareholders who get the loot, not the workers, businessmen, and consumers who subsequently labor under its crushing burden of debt.

Moreover, unlike standard LBOs where sponsors claim – and sometimes do – enhance returns by steady debt paydowns, the Fed’s national LBO has worked in only one direction: Namely, toward ever higher national leverage ratios and a progressively greater burden of excess debt, which we are here defining as leverage above the 140% of GDP historic standard.

The blue area of the graph below depicts the growing margin of debt in excess of the 140% of GDP standard as it stood in 1955. It makes clear as a bell that we are not talking about an oscillating cyclical trend, but a long-term path driven by the central bank printing presses that have generated a growing, debilitating wedge of debt on the US economy.

In fact, when your editor first arrived in Washington, DC as a youthful Capitol Hill staffer on the eve of Nixon’s folly at Camp David in August 1971, the excess debt wedge stood at a modest $163 billion and 15% of GDP. But by the time Greenspan took the helm at the Fed in 1987, the newly liberated proprietors of its printing presses had already expanded the excess debt wedge to $4.416 trillion and 95% of GDP.

Thereafter, of course, it was off to the races. Even before Greenspan went full retard after the dotcom crash, excess debt already stood at $16.2 trillion and 158% of GDP, but in successive turns at bat his successors and assigns – Bernanke, Yellen, and Powell – operated the printing presses on turbocharge for the next two decades, causing the excess debt wedge to balloon to nearly $49 trillion and 227% of GDP by 2019.

Despite Powell’s belated efforts to shrink the Fed’s elephantine balance sheet via a short spell of QT (quantitative tightening), there has been no respite from the excess debt tsunami. At the end of 2025, in fact, it stood at $113.7 trillion and has continued to grow by leaps and bounds and is likely to hit $120 trillion by year-end 2026.

Yet and yet. The proof that none of the chronic and systemic interest rate repression that fostered this debt explosion was necessary lies in the pudding of the historical economic performance statistics. Indeed, if we scroll back to the very low starting debt figures and national leverage numbers of 1955, what we find is that was one barnburner of a year economically. On a Y/Y basis, real GDP had boomed by 7.1%, while the CPI actually fell by 0.4% and real median family income surged by 6.6%.

In a word, 1955 was the epicenter of the Golden Era that Donald Trump only brags about today. The aforementioned $600 billion of total public and private debt, which represented 141% of GDP, stood right square upon the prior long-term average of about 150% after 1870.

Obviously, it took nothing like today’s mountainous debt levels and the associated inflationary bloating of both financial asset prices and goods and services to generate the prosperity of 1955 – a time when the great President Dwight Eisenhower was also slashing real defense spending by 35%, seeking a rapprochement with the Soviet Union, and moving the Federal budget into balance for the first time since the 1920s.

None of these conditions were remotely akin to the spend/borrow/speculate and print modus operandi of present times. In fact, during the period between Q1 1952 and Q1 1966, constant dollar US output (as measured by real final sales of domestic product) rose by 4.0% per annum.

By contrast, during the years since Q4 2007, when the Fed went all-in on stimmies and money-printing, real final sales grew at just 1.96% per annum or by barely half the growth rate during the Golden Era of the 1950s and 1960s. Over a continuous 14-year period these growth rate differences make a huge cumulative difference.

As shown in the graph below, the US economy was actually 72% larger by Q1 1966 than it had been in Q1 1952. By contrast, under the growth rate which has prevailed since the Great Finance Crisis – and notwithstanding massive fiscal and monetary stimulus from Washington policy makers – it would have been only 30% larger.

We’d call that a smoking gun. The Fed and its shills on Wall Street and Washington alike always claim that a modest amount of inflation on Main Street and a goodly helping of asset inflation on Wall Street are the necessary price to obtain higher growth, job creation, and overall prosperity on Main Street.

It is not. Not in the slightest as we detail below.

In fact, there is no contest. The table below compares real growth, inflation, real median family income, and job growth for the two periods, and the sharp contrasts speak for themselves.

Finally, it needs be recalled that this 14-year Golden Era occurred immediately after the 1951 Treasury Accord, which ended WWII-style monetization of the public debt and the pegging of Treasury bond interest rates at artificially low levels. As a consequence, under the sound money leadership of William McChesney Martin, the Fed’s printing press was virtually idle until 1966, when LBJ forced the Fed Chairman to monetize his ill-conceived “guns and butter” policies for war in Southeast Asia and the so-called Great Society at home.

Over the course of 1951 thru Q2 1966, however, the Fed’s balance sheet had expanded by a micr0scopic 0.7% per year, and that’s in nominal terms.

In inflation-adjusted dollars it actually shrank by nearly 11% and dropped from 15% of GDP to just 7%.

By the lights of today’s Fed fanboys, of course, the American economy – left unattended and undernourished by the central bank printing presses as it was during this 14-year period – should have tumbled into severe economic disrepair and crisis.

It didn’t. American businesses, workers, consumers, savers, investors, inventors, and speculators pursuing their own best interest on the free market – coupled with relatively sound money – caused the American economy to actually boom and glow with noninflationary prosperity.

In a word, it showed its true stuff. No government “stimulus” and lickety-split debt growth was needed then, and it’s not needed now.

So the first step toward restoration of a True Golden Era is the opposite of the recipe of easy money, big deficits, high tariffs, and ceaseless Washington meddling in the process of investment, resource allocation, and growth on the free market.

Simply pass a law forbidding the Fed to own government debt or buy and sell any securities at all. In lieu of this mode of monetary central planning, instead, just restore passive Discount Window lending at a penalty spread above the free market rate of interest based on the presentation of sound commercial collateral by Member banks.

That’s all it would take to promote sustainable prosperity. And the proof is in the Golden Era pudding.

Undertake these reforms else we will see the rage grow and the long knives of wealth slayers drawn and used in ways no one wants. An economy this top-heavy with paper wealth – as the poor and middle class get destroyed with persistent inflation, slow growth, and unstable labor markets pervasive with dropouts – is not sustainable. It’s not capitalism but rather corruption by the printing press. History shows precisely where this leads, namely to some upheaval that is even worse for everyone.

The House of Representatives will vote today on final passage of the $1.15 trillion National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027 (H.R. 8800) – and with it, Section 219, the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, a provision directing the Pentagon to expand and accelerate the integration of US and Israeli military technology, supply chains, and defense industrial capacity.

On paper, it is one section among hundreds in a sprawling must-pass bill. In practice, it has become the single most watched line item in the entire package – partly because of what it does, and partly because House leadership just made sure nobody gets to vote on it by itself.

What Section 219 Actually Does

Section 219 – numbered Section 224 in earlier drafts – directs the Secretary of Defense to designate an “executive agent” inside the Department of Defense whose mandate is to expand and accelerate joint research, development, co-production, and industrial integration with Israel across next-gen warfare domains: missile and air defense, counter-drone systems, cyber and electronic warfare, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, quantum technologies, directed energy, biotechnology, and defense manufacturing – with explicit pathways for moving Israeli-origin and jointly developed technology into US programs of record.

House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL), who introduced the bill on May 13, has pushed back on the “merger” framing, saying the section simply designates a single senior official to coordinate cooperation that already exists, but critics say that’s exactly the point. 

Executive agents are permanent bureaucratic machinery – they outlive administrations, and a statutory mandate to “expand and accelerate” only runs in one direction. The Quincy Institute, in a June analysis titled Cooperation without Oversight, argued the executive-agent authority makes the provision “significantly different” from America’s existing defense technology arrangements with any other allied nation. Once two industrial bases are physically intertwined – shared components, co-production lines, joint classified programs – no future Congress unwinds that with a floor amendment.

What “Executive Agent” Means

A June policy note by the Quincy Institute’s Steven Simon starts from an inconvenient fact for both sides of this fight: the United States does not need Section 219 to buy, co-develop, or field Israeli defense technology. Iron Dome, the Trophy active-protection system, and Barak missiles were all acquired under existing law – cooperative R&D authority under 22 U.S.C. § 2767(j)(1), plus standard Foreign Military Sales and Direct Commercial Sales channels under the Arms Export Control Act. Whatever the initiative is for, it is not access. Its real impact is structural.

The structure is the executive agent. Under DoD Directive 5101.01, an executive agent’s authority takes precedence over other Defense Department component heads within its assigned scope – meaning the Israel-cooperation agent could overrule determinations by offices like the Defense Technology Security Administration, the Pentagon body that manages the risks of transferring defense technology and critical information abroad. Pair that precedence with a statutory mandate to “expand and accelerate,” and the note’s conclusion follows: wherever an internal office pushes back on a transfer or an integration step, the agent exists to push it through. State Department export-control channels would still operate independently, and programs must comply with existing law – but inside the Pentagon, the tie would go to integration.

No other US ally has anything like this. Defense cooperation with the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, and NATO runs through the standard architecture – the under secretary of defense for policy and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency – with no dedicated agent holding precedence authority to promote one country’s participation in sensitive US programs. Proponents read the same structure as streamlining: one accountable senior official instead of a dozen scattered offices. Quincy reads it as handing Israeli defense firms “their own promoter in the Pentagon” – and recommends Congress strip the provision outright.

The note also supplies the missing context for why this is happening now. Section 219 is one piece of a broader, publicly acknowledged shift from aid to integration. The FY2026 NDAA already ordered a working group to study folding Israel into the National Technology and Industrial Base. A draft Senate intelligence authorization provision would mandate expanded intelligence sharing with Israel while limiting the president’s power to curtail it. And the endgame is not hidden: the Washington Post reported in June that Netanyahu himself backs the GOP effort to wind down the $3.3 billion in annual direct military aid in favor of integration and purchases, and House Resolution 1339 frames the transition, in its own title, as “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Initiative.” The concern Quincy raises is the one every aid critic should sit with: a $3.3 billion check is at least a number – published, debated, and voted on every year. Integrated supply chains carry no price tag and come up for no annual vote.

The entrenchment aspect is serious:the F-35 program already ran this experiment, and it is worth being precise about who paid for it. When Turkey was expelled from the program in 2019 over its purchase of a Russian air-defense system, Turkish industry was building roughly 1,000 parts in the global supply chain – and the costs of cutting it loose landed on both sides. Turkey lost its planned jets and its production share. But the United States – the party doing the expelling – did not walk away clean: late parts deliveries spiked, finished-jet deliveries went delinquent, and the already-delayed program slid further behind schedule, all documented by the Government Accountability Office. Fuse two defense industrial bases deeply enough, and the option of changing course quietly disappears – whatever the next decade brings.

Speedrunning it… 

On June 15, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) filed a bipartisan amendment to strike Section 219 outright. The Rules Committee refused to make it in order – no debate, no vote. Then the process blew up on its own: on June 30, the rule governing the NDAA failed on the House floor, 198-224, after thirteen Republicans revolted – not over Israel, but over Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to staple a contested voter-ID bill to the defense package. Johnson canceled the rest of the week and sent members home.

Opponents of Section 219 hoped the do-over would finally produce a clean vote. Instead, the Rules Committee reported a reworked rule, H. Res. 1438, on a party-line 8-4 vote Monday night – once again leaving the Massie-Khanna amendment off the approved list. The full House adopted the rule Tuesday, 214-211, a three-vote margin. The resolution sweeps six separate measures to the floor at once, puts the NDAA under a structured rule limiting amendments to a leadership-approved list, and closes off the other five bills entirely, according to a Capitol Wire analysis of the rule.

Massie posted minutes after the floor vote, saying “No debate or vote was allowed on section 219, integration of US military technology and supply chains with Israel’s.” 

Unfortunately the Rule passed just now and no debate or vote was allowed on section 219, integration of US military technology and supply chains with Israel’s.

The NDAA will receive a recorded vote tomorrow with section 219 in it. I’ll vote no.

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) July 21, 2026

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene – out of Congress since January but still commanding one of the largest audiences in Republican politics – amplified him within hours, in considerably hotter language:

This will be the most watched recorded vote in modern times.
It will give a list of names of every Member of Congress who betrayed America, committed treason, and sold out the American people to a foreign country.

— Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@FmrRepMTG) July 21, 2026

She’s not wrong – this roll call will be screenshotted, sorted into lists, and campaigned on for years – which is what happens when leadership denies members a clean vote and forces every position into a single up-or-down proxy.

Khanna, for his part, is already looking past Wednesday. “Thomas Massie and I have been fighting to stop the integration between our military and the Israeli military. It’s shocking that this even has to be explained. It’s about American sovereignty,” he said Tuesday, vowing to fight the provision in conference negotiations with the Senate. Civil liberties groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, had backed the strike amendment on the narrower ground that a change this significant deserved a direct vote.

The Alliance Is Already The Deepest On The Books

To understand what Section 219 accelerates, consider this: the US-Israel defense relationship is already the most extensive technology partnership Washington maintains with any nation it holds no mutual defense treaty with.

Under the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding, the United States committed $38 billion over ten years – $3.3 billion annually in foreign military financing plus $500 million a year for missile defense – the largest such pledge ever made to any country. Israel has been a designated Major Non-NATO Ally since 1987 and was elevated to “major strategic partner” by statute in 2014.

The hardware already flows both ways. Iron Dome is co-produced by Israel’s Rafael and America’s RTX; the US Army bought two batteries of its own, and the Marine Corps fields an interceptor derived from it. David’s Sling and the Arrow interceptor family were co-developed with US funding and US primes. Israeli Trophy active-protection systems ride on American Abrams tanks. Israel was the first foreign air force to fly the F-35 in combat, and Israeli industry builds wing sets for the global F-35 program. The United States has pre-positioned a war reserve stockpile on Israeli soil for decades and has drawn it down repeatedly when inventories ran short elsewhere.

Congress has spent years bolting on the machinery – binational R&D foundations, working groups, counter-drone cooperation mandates. Section 219 does not start this trajectory. It codifies it, staffs it, and hands it a permanent owner. 

So what would America be giving up when its defense industrial base is formally fused with a foreign state’s?

• Strategic autonomy. Leverage runs both ways. When supply chains are integrated, every future policy disagreement – over war aims, over strikes, over settlements – collides with America’s own production dependencies. Creating daylight, conditioning aid, or simply saying no becomes materially harder, by design. The legislative tracker A New Policy argues the initiative would entrench Israeli technology inside the US defense supply chain in a way that shields the relationship from the annual appropriations process – insulating it from Congress’s power of the purse just as public support for unconditional aid is eroding.
• Escalation coupling. This is not hypothetical in July 2026. The United States is in an ongoing war with Iran; the Strait of Hormuz was shut to tanker traffic; the regional escalation ladder has been climbed in public. Critics ask the obvious question: when the industrial bases are fused, does the next conflict automatically become an American production commitment – before Congress votes on anything?
• The constitutional shortcut. Commitments of treaty-like depth and permanence are being created by simple majority, inside a must-pass bill, under a rule that forbids amendment. The Founders put a two-thirds Senate threshold on entangling alliances for a reason. 
• Industrial priorities. With shipyards behind schedule, solid-rocket-motor bottlenecks, and munitions lines still scaling, the America First argument holds that marginal dollars and engineering talent should rebuild the domestic base before deepening integration offshore with anyone.
• Concentration risk. Any deep technology-sharing arrangement, with any partner, raises export-control, counterintelligence, and single-point-of-failure questions. Those questions were asked loudly and publicly about AUKUS. Here, the rule ensured they would not even be asked on the floor.

As Antiwar.com notes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described the integration plan as his own idea – begging the question of whose priorities a permanent Pentagon office would be built to serve.

Ten months ago Keir Starmer warned that anyone without a government digital ID “will not be able to work in the United Kingdom.” On Tuesday – day two of the Burnham premiership – the scheme was formally killed off.

It wasn’t the nearly 2.9 million people who signed the petition. It wasn’t the civil liberties groups who dragged it through Parliament. It died because the new Prime Minister needed £1.8 billion to scrap VAT on electricity bills.

In his first major act in No 10, Andy Burnham announced that VAT will come off domestic electricity bills from October 1, timed to land before the next Ofgem price cap. Qualifying small businesses, charities and care homes benefit too. New Chancellor John Healey – installed Monday evening after Rachel Reeves was shown the door – said the move “is funded this year from cancelling the Digital ID programme,” which the government prices at £1.8 billion over three years.

So ends BritCard: sold as the answer to illegal migration, buried as a line item in somebody else’s tax cut.

A Short, Unhappy Life

None of this will surprise regular readers. When Starmer unveiled the plan last September, officials admitted its “efficacy depends on everyone having them” – universal or nothing. The pitch was border control. The architecture, as we noted at the time, was always closer to population management: only around 40,000 of the nearly one million migrants who arrived last year came by small boat. A universal ID for the entire country, aimed at the smallest slice of the problem it was sold on, was a problem-reaction-solution classic.

What followed was mission creep at record speed. By October it had become a bait and switch. By January ministers were floating digital IDs for newborns – cradle-to-grave tracking for a £1.8 billion program. Nearly 2.9 million people signed a petition, forcing a Parliamentary debate, and by mid-January the government had dropped the mandatory right-to-work requirement, the load-bearing wall of the whole project. Big Brother Watch’s Silkie Carlo said taxpayers should not be footing “a £1.8 billion bill for a digital ID scheme that is frankly pointless.” Ministers pressed on anyway with a voluntary version that was never the optional convenience they claimed.

Now even that shell is gone – cancelled not on principle but for parts.

Follow The Money

Whether the money is actually there is another question. The Times reports the VAT cut is fully funded. The OBR counters that the £1.8 billion Digital ID budget was never funded in the first place, which means cancelling it pays for nothing. At least one former minister has said flatly that the cut is unfunded. The government’s own release concedes that “updated costs will be set out at Budget” – the arithmetic, in other words, arrives later. More giveaways are already queued: a 20 percent business-rates cut for hospitality within days, per HuffPost UK, and a £2 bus-fare cap as soon as Wednesday.

Gilt traders ran the same numbers and reached the same place. The 10-year yield jumped 8 basis points to 5.04 percent on Monday as Burnham’s early remarks stoked fears of a looser fiscal stance, then pared the move once Healey – the former defence secretary who quit Starmer’s cabinet over defence funding – took the Treasury instead of Ed Miliband, who was packed off to the Foreign Office. Yields fell across the curve Tuesday morning in evident relief, with sterling steady near $1.344. Relief is not confidence. British 10-year borrowing costs are still the highest in the G7, and every unfunded pound of Burnham’s day-two populism gets marked to market eventually.

What Actually Died

To be precise about the corpse: what was cancelled is the standalone national BritCard programme, and nothing else. It does not touch Gov.uk One Login and its millions of enrolled users, the Gov.uk Wallet, or the Online Safety Act’s age-verification regime, which as we reported in June was already working as a backdoor identity mandate for every phone in Britain, with Google and Apple building the plumbing.

Schemes like this also have a habit of returning under new names with smaller line items. A government that just banked £1.8 billion in savings that were never there knows exactly where to find another £1.8 billion next year.

Still, take the win. Nearly three million signatures couldn’t kill BritCard. One expensive winter did.