9 Could we rewrite the argument? I disagree with your answer to question 5. You view Swift and Stafford as standing for the proposition that activities in the middle of a stream of CATSS are themselves CATSS. But the situation is different, which is why the decisions in Swift and Stafford seem to go against the other decisions of the Court during the time period.  The regulations under question in those cases were not dealing directly with the stockyards or slaughterhouses, but how the cattle got to the stockyards.  At the time the owners of the slaughterhouses were attempting to buy the stockyards, and thus directly control where the cattle were brought in from and how much they were then sold to the slaughterhouses (themselves) for.  Thus, the slaughterhouses were actually controlling the movement of the cattle from the time they left the farm they were raised on.  That is why I believe the Court upheld that law, not because of the nature of the business, but because the slaughterhouses were trying to control the stream of commerce.  In other words, what the slaughterhouses were trying to do directly affected CATSS in cattle, and thus the government could regulate their activities. Unless the pig slaughterhouses were attempting to control the entirety of the process, they were engaged in a purely local activity that like most production activities had only an indirect effect on CATSS, see Carter Coal and Schechter Poultry, and therefore couldn’t be regulated by Congress. [Deletions aren’t indicated; new material is in red.] Note how the doctrinal rules are brought into this answer, with relatively little change.