The news from the nation’s highest court isn’t all bad. George Leef’s latest Forbes column highlights a good ruling from earlier this week.
On June 22, the Supreme Court released its decision in Horne v. Department of Agriculture. When I wrote about Horne after oral arguments last fall, I called it the “raisin ripoff” case because the federal government (specifically, the Department of Agriculture’s Raisin Administrative Committee) had demanded 47 percent of the Hornes’ crop for its “price stabilization” system back in 2002.
The value of those raisins was roughly $484,000. When the Hornes refused to obey the Department’s order to turn over the raisins, they were slapped with an assessment plus a fine amounting to $695,000. They fought back, arguing that the government had violated their rights under the Fifth Amendment because it sought to take their property without paying just compensation.
Litigation dragged on for years, with the case making two appearances in the Supreme Court.
Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion finally puts to rest the strained, desperate arguments that the government had hoped would keep this absurd policy going.
For one, he dismissed the claim that the Fifth Amendment was only meant to protect against takings of real property and that takings of personal property (like raisins) did not have to be compensated. Roberts noted that one of the reasons why the Constitution’s drafters included the just compensation requirement was that the people had suffered from uncompensated seizures of personal property by the British and did not want any of that in their new country.
Furthermore, he easily dealt with the Ninth Circuit’s idea that the taking of the property of raisin growers was constitutionally OK because the growers might benefit from the higher prices and also might get some money returned to them – besides which, no one forces them to go into the raisin business in the first place. “Selling produce in interstate commerce, although subject to reasonable governmental regulations, is similarly not a special benefit that the Government may hold hostage, to be ransomed by the waiver of constitutional protection,” Roberts replied.
