Prop. 12, on humane sale of pork in California, upheld by Supreme Court
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This is a super-weird combination of Justices, which includes those from the furthest right and furthest left.
As the Volokh Conspiracy noted:
> Justice Gorsuch wrote for the Court, but only two justices (Thomas and Barrett) agreed with him in full. In fact, the Justices were quite splintered. [1]
The third-listed takeaway is related to this odd clumping of Justics.
> First, the opinion signals a narrowing of the Dormant Commerce Clause to an anti-discrimination rule, as opposed to a broader protection for the frictionless movement of goods and services across state lines.
Second, the opinion provides a bright green light for states to adopt environmental laws that regulate goods and services based upon how they are produced (e.g. their carbon intensity, etc.). California already leads the way with such laws, and this decision should make it more difficult for business groups to challenge such measures.
Third, the decision complicates the already questionable "Roberts Court is pro-business" narrative, by demonstrating (yet again) that when conservative jurisprudential commitments conflict with corporate interests, the former prevail. Combined with decisions such as Virginia Uranium v. Warren, National Pork Producers shows that business groups cannot depend on conservative justices to support their challenges to state regulations.
1: https://reason.com/volokh/2023/05/11/scotus-chooses-californ...
> JUSTICE KAVANAUGH’s solo concurrence in part and dissent in part says the quiet part aloud: California’s market is so lucrative that almost any in-state measure will influence how out-of-state profit-maximizing firms choose to operate. ... But if that makes all the difference, it means voters in States with smaller markets are constitutionally entitled to greater authority to regulate in- state sales than voters in States with larger markets. So much for the Constitution’s “fundamental principle of equal sovereignty among the States.”
Equal sovereignty does not mean equal influence.
People either snoozed through their US government courses or fundamentally misunderstood the role of the senate when they bring up nonsense about it being unfair. It is perfectly fair, just not in the direction they want.
Just because the representatives suck doesn't mean the system does. A direct democracy would be a catastrophy, as most people who vote are not even paying attention. I think it'd be better to restrict voting to taxpayers federally, and land owners locally.
Not really. The Senate was meant to represent the interests of the state and state governments as an institution rather than the people of the state but the 17th amendment subverted that under the guise of poblic choice the people because state legislatures wanted to shirk that responsibility. The net result is that we've lost much of the Senate's value as being an elitist/anti-populist/institutional check on populism, and the vagaries of electoral politics in general, without anything to replace it.
> But if that makes all the difference, it means voters in States with smaller markets are constitutionally entitled to greater authority to regulate in- state sales than voters in States with larger markets. So much for the Constitution’s “fundamental principle of equal sovereignty among the States.
Good! It's a start.
Gorsuch characterized the pig farmers as attempting to expand the scope of the dormant commerce clause. He wrote in a section of the opinion that if farmers are looking for a national standard on how to raise pigs, they should turn to Congress instead of the courts.
its a pretty accountable performance from Gorsuch imo.
Of course this increases the need to pay decent wages to employees too.
CA customers already pay more for their pork than most other states' residents (beef and chicken are a large part of CA agriculture but pork is not), so the practical effect is a small relative increase in pork prices for CA residents and a huge relative increase in pork prices for everyone outside of CA.
Couldn't producers decide not to sell pork to California? Or perhaps to segment production?
Pork producers argued in their legal briefs that CA was such a big market for pork that they would have to raise all pork in compliance with CA rules in order to sell to CA. Taking them at their word, this will mean drastic increases in prices for most of the U.S., with minor increases in prices in CA.
OTOH, if a producer chooses to forego the lucrative CA market, they could continue raising pork using local standards. Some smaller producers will leave the CA market. The big ones won't because CA represents a material portion of their revenue.
I suspect the smaller producers are largely already CA-complaint and just need to be certified as such. Small and medium scale outfits tend to have minimal issue with providing a whopping "24 square feet" of pen space per sow and the ability for said sow to stand up and turn fully around. It's the large corporate outfits running CAFOs that are most impacted by this - and their attempts to brand this as being hostile to "the poor small independent farmers" is as disingenuous as it is predictable.
Pork products are used in a lot of other things than meat and hide.
Nobody is entitled to anything other than an equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages.
Protein is prevalent in many forms and to exclude a significant portion due to dietary familiarity is the problem.