Supreme Court: Raisin board unconstitutional
latimes.com
latimes.com
http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/06/22/416538...
Decision
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/14-275
Previous discussion on HN
Meanwhile the case itself is being severely misrepresented in media coverage.
The raisin program, as it had been run, basically had three steps:
1. A committee made up of farmers and others in the raisin business decide on a percentage of that year's crop to set aside.
2. Farmers set aside that percentage of their crop, and pass it to the committee.
3. Any profit left after administrative fees from the sale of those raisins is distributed to the farmers.
The big question was not whether the government lacks the power to run this kind of program, but whether this program is the government taking private property for public use, and (if it is) whether the payment for taking the property has to occur up-front.
The eight Justices in the majority agreed it was taking of private property for public use (Sotomayor disagreed on a technical aspect of the definition, hence her dissent). But those eight did not agree entirely on whether the government would have to pay up-front; five of them said yes, three others said no and that it should go back to a lower court to determine if the raisin growers were entitled to compensation (since the program was meant to, and apparently succeeded at, keeping raising prices higher -- in which case they might not be entitled to any further cash payment).
While I agree some of her dissent is indeed technical and should not be considered extreme, there are certainly some extreme elements. To wit, from her dissent,
"...insofar as the Hornes wish to sell some raisins in a market regulated by the Government and at a price supported by governmental intervention, the Order requires that they give up the right to sell a portion of those raisins at that price and instead accept disposal of them at a lower price."
I think most reasonable people would not consider that to be ordinary government regulation; forcing farmers to sell at a particular if they wish to participate in the "free" market in fact sounds like certain horror stories you hear about socialist regimes (note: I am not imparting any judgement on President Obama here w.r.t. socialism).
Also, programs of this nature are old enough that it's really difficult to try to put current interpretations of labels like "socialist" on them; many of the people involved in originally drafting, passing and implementing this stuff would've been, by modern standards, too conservative even for the Tea Party.
(though there is a useful more-recent term to apply here: since the New Deal, farmers and ranchers have essentially been the biggest welfare queens in the United States, to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars in subsidies, tax breaks, favorable land/water rates and government-run price-fixing programs, and generally the anti-"socialism" forces in our government have no problem with requiring welfare recipients to make sacrifices in return for the benefits, so why not be consistent about it?)
And yeah, I am not trying to pass judgement using the label of socialism, I am trying to draw parallels to what people often decry as one of the evils of socialist states. I understand that these programs were not created in such a context; I certainly do not care about party affiliations or political leanings, only the direct, observable outcomes of the program.
So I suspect the strongest possible statement is that this is a program most people accepted as constitutional without much controversy at the time of the New Deal, but since then the Court's interpretation (and the political climate in the country, of which the Court is for better or worse a reflection) has shifted.
Breyer - Milner v. Department of Navy Alito - Snyder v. Phelps Sotomayor - United States v. Jicarilla Apache Nation Ginsburg - Kentucky v. King Thomas - Pepper v. United States Kennedy - Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S. A. Scalia - Ransom v. FIA Card Services, N. A.
Roberts and Kagan are the only justices I haven't found an example of where they were lone dissenters.
But more importantly, what's wrong with a justice being the lone decenter? Don't we want justices who vote on the merits of the case alone? What's the value in having nine justices who all think a like and vote the same way? I think our supreme court should reflect the values and priorities of all americans.
Seems to me like you just don't like Sotomayor. Which is fine, you are entitled to your opinion, but why don't you come up with criticisms more constructive than calling her "extremist," because you are basically just encouraging group think.
mp3: http://www.supremecourt.gov/media/audio/mp3files/14-275.mp3
@ about 17:30 a discussion begins about the difference between taking records and taking other things. The defendant's lawyer argued that taking the raisins is a taking of property and taking records (in most cases) is not. He kinda had to argue that because he was pressed. Maybe it's a positive sign that the court was asking about it in the context of this decision. If nothing else, the intrinsic privacy of information in itself has value.
The prosecution crashes and burns off the line @ 25:00 the wreck continues, 48:18 ha.
But yeah, this particular piece of regulation seems to have outlived its purpose.