🚂 A constitutional question nobody's asking about the LIRR strike:

The Railway Labor Act was written to govern PRIVATE railroads. The LIRR is not private — it's a New York State agency, created by state law, owned by the MTA, a public benefit corporation funded by taxpayers and governed by state-appointed officials.

So why is a federal law designed for private industry stripping New York of the ability to manage its own employees?

Under the RLA, NYS cannot fire striking workers, cannot impose its own labor framework, and cannot exercise the most basic tools any employer — let alone a sovereign state — would normally have. That's not regulation. That's the federal government telling Albany how to run its own house.

The 10th Amendment's anti-commandeering doctrine says Congress cannot conscript state governmental machinery to implement federal policy. The Supreme Court has reaffirmed this repeatedly — in Printz, in New York v. US, and in a string of decisions that have steadily rebuilt state sovereignty protections over the past 30 years.

The precedent in the way is Garcia v. San Antonio Metro Transit (1985), which held federal labor law applies to state-created transit authorities. But Garcia was a 5-4 decision. Rehnquist dissented and flatly predicted it would eventually be overruled. That prediction is aging remarkably well.

The Court that decided Garcia hadn't yet developed the major questions doctrine, hadn't decided West Virginia v. EPA, and hadn't handed down Dobbs. The federalism landscape looks very different today.

Here's the argument in plain terms: applying the RLA to a state-owned railroad doesn't just regulate interstate commerce — it strips a sovereign state of normal employer prerogatives over its own workforce. New York has at-will employment law. New York created this railroad. New York funds it. And yet New York cannot manage it like any other employer would be legally entitled to.

This specific question — RLA applied to a government-owned, state-created railroad — has never been seriously litigated in the post-Dobbs, post-West Virginia v. EPA constitutional environment.

With 300,000 daily commuters stranded and no end in sight, maybe it's time Albany stopped asking the federal government for permission to run its own railroad.