The reign of the despotic Raisin Administrative Committee, (RAC) a New Deal agency formerly allowed to seize raisin farmers’ crops without compensation, is (partly) over. The Supreme Court ruled overwhelmingly in favor of a rebellious raisin farmer, in Monday’s Horne v. Department of Agriculture decision.
The absurd program grants the RAC authority to seize raisins from farmers in order to inflate prices. And until today, they did not have to provide any compensation.
California raisin farmer Marvin D. Horne, the raisin rebel in question, had refused to cooperate with the RAC’s demands that he fork over 47 percent of his crops. He was fined $695,000 for his defiance.
The court ruled, 8-1, that the seizures amount to a taking of private property, and, under the Fifth Amendment, require just compensation.
“You come up with the truck, and you get the shovels, and you take their raisins, probably in the dark of night,” Chief Justice Roberts told the U.S. deputy solicitor general during oral arguments.
The Obama administration tried to salvage the program, arguing at one point that raisin farmers were always free to grow something else.
“‘Let them sell wine’ is probably not much more comforting to the raisin growers than similar retorts have been to others throughout history,” Roberts remarked in his majority decision.
He also rejected an argument relying on a former court case, where pesticide manufacturers, in order to gain permission to sell their products, were compelled to give up “property” in the form of trade secrets. The government tried to claim that, in the same way, raisin farmers were trading part of their crops for permission to sell the remainder.
“Raisins are not dangerous pesticides; they are a healthy snack,” Roberts objected.
“Raisins…are private property — the fruit of the growers’ labor — not ‘public things subject to the absolute control of the state,’” he wrote. “Any physical taking of them for public use must be accompanied by just compensation.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the lone dissenter. The remaining eight judges did not agree, however, on whether Horne should now be compensated.
Justices Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that Horne’s family “should simply be relieved of the obligation to pay the fine and associated civil penalty they were assessed when they resisted the government’s effort to take their raisins,” arguing that the 13-year-old case “has gone on long enough.”
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan instead said that the case should go back to a lower court, which could assess the program’s impact on the Hornes.
