In Major Victory for Property Rights, SCOTUS Strikes Down USDA Seizure of California Raisins
22nd June 2015
The good guys win one for once. Yet another stake in the heart of FDR’s corpse.
In a decision issued today in Horne v. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the USDA’s raisin confiscation scheme as an unconstitutional violation of the Fifth Amendment.
“The reserve requirement imposed by the Raisin Committee is a clear physical taking,” observed Chief Justice John Roberts. “Actual raisins are transferred from the growers to the Government. Title to the raisins passes to the Raisin Committee.” That is a textbook example of an uncompensated government taking of private property, Roberts held, and it therefore must fall under the plain text of the Fifth Amendment.
And it also lays bare the defects of ‘diversity’:
Justice Sotomayor filed a solo dissent, in which she sided entirely with the USDA. “The government may condition the ability to offer goods in the market on the giving-up of certain property interests without effecting a per se taking,” Sotomayor asserted.
Thereby proving that she is incompetent to be a Justice of the Supreme Court. The forced ‘giving up of certain property interests’ to the government is the essence of a ‘per se taking’. Apparently a ‘wise Latina’ can’t read plain English.