Good day all. The 2014-2015 session of the United States Supreme Court is coming to a close and the justices have begun releasing their decisions on matters of law and the constitution. One of the first deals with raisins.
Raisins you may ask? Well, in this case it isn’t so much the raisins as how the government was basically stealing a part of the raisin farmers crop each year and not paying for it. Here are the details from Fox News:
The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the government can’t force raisin farmers to give up part of their annual crop for less than it’s worth, a victory for conservative groups that hailed the decision as a win for private property rights.
The justices ruled 8-1 that a 1940s-era program born out of the Great Depression is unconstitutional because it allows federal officials to seize personal property from farmers without fully compensating them, even though the goal is to benefit farmers by stabilizing market prices.
Oh great. We’re still dealing with the fallout of the New Deal almost a century later. For those of you who can’t be bothered to learn American History, one of the segments of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was near soviet style central planning and control of the farming system. It wasn’t quite as bad as what the Communists did, but they used to tell farmer what they can plant and how much. There’s no telling how many people might have starved to death thanks to that bit of Soviet style control. (The plan was to raise the cost of food so farmers made some money)
The court sided with California farmers Marvin and Laura Horne, who claimed they were losing money under a program they called outdated and ineffective. They had been fined $695,000 for trying to get around it.
Ahh yes, the fines issued by a bureaucracy with no judicial oversight. So much for the 6th Amendment.
Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts said the government must pay “just compensation” when it takes personal goods, just as when it takes land away. Roberts rejected the government’s argument that the Hornes voluntarily chose to participate in the raisin market and have the option of growing different crops if they don’t like it.
It’s pretty obvious that the Hornes didn’t “voluntarily” join the program if they were being fined almost $700k for not giving up their property.
“‘Let them sell wine’ is probably not much more comforting to the raisin growers than similar retorts have been to others throughout history,” Roberts said. “Property rights cannot be so easily manipulated.”
The Progressive Liberal Fascist Democrats have never been concerned for the lower classes rights, property or otherwise. Pity you didn’t understand that a few years ago Roberts when you caved in on Obamacare.
The case was considered one of the most important property disputes to reach the high court since 2005, when the justices ruled that the city of New London, Connecticut, could use the power of eminent domain to hand private homes or businesses to developers to help stimulate economic improvement. That case sparked a backlash in many states and led more than 40 state legislatures to pass laws protecting property rights.
That case, (The Kelo Decision), ranks right down their with the Dred Scott decision in the ranks of bad decisions by the Supreme Court. It basically ended the rights of landowners in the United States in favor of the local and state governments to basically steal people’s homes and give the land to their cronies. There was no difference with regards to this New Deal program except that the farmers weren’t even paid for what was taken.
The program was authorized by a 1937 law that allows the U.S. Department of Agriculture to keep prices for raisins and other crops steady by helping to manage supply. A 1949 marketing order allowed farmers to form a committee that decides how much of the raisin crop handlers must turn over to the government each year.
Someone in the Roosevelt Administration, (Pretty much all of them as it turned out), was rather enamored with the Soviet Union’s “5-Year Plans” regarding everything. Worked out real well for them too as I recall. But hey, Communism was the wave of the future back then.
These raisins would be placed into a reserve pool to be sold outside the open market, used for the school lunch program or given away to charities and foreign governments. Any profits from these reserve sales would go toward funding the committee and anything left over went back to the farmers.
In other words, the farmers got…nothing. That’s the way these programs always work. All money belongs to the state, not to those who actually earn it. Well, the Hornes finally got fed up.
The Hornes refused to participate in the program in 2003, when farmers were required to give up 47 percent of their crop but received far less in return than their costs of production. They also refused to cooperate in 2004, when other farmers gave up 30 percent of the crop in 2004 and were paid nothing.
And the bureaucrats decided to make an example out of them, and just like the EPA, tried to destroy them and take everything they had. Fortunately, the Supreme Court mostly saw this for what it was.
The Hornes’ lawyer, John O’Quinn, called the ruling “a personal vindication” for the couple and “an important win for personal liberty.”
As you might expect, the Department of Agriculture wasn’t thrilled with the decision.
A USDA spokesman said agency officials were reviewing the ruling and had no immediate comment.
What’s to review? The court told you to take your regulations and stuff them where the sun doesn’t shine. Now, this was not a unanimous decision. There was one justice who thinks it’s perfectly fine for the government to steal people’s property.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the only dissenter. She said the program did not deprive the Hornes of all property rights, it just limited the amount of potential income they could earn from it.
Sotomayor, as usual, gets it wrong, but then she almost always does. She was appointed to the Court for three reasons.
- She is a woman
- She is Hispanic
- She supports all aspects of Obamacare and will always rule in favor of the government.
Granted she does, on rare occasions, stray from the Progressive Fascist reservation, but usually it happens when the case in front of her is so blatantly unconstitutional that she can’t really justify ruling in favor of her liege, King Putt.
All in all, this is a good start to the end of session ruling that will be coming out over the next couple of weeks. There are many others, including another shot at Obamacare, that could go either way, depending on what Justice Kennedy had for breakfast that morning. We shall see how that goes.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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