Baylen Linnekin: Supreme Court Gets Another Chance to Kill Crazy Raisin Regulations
There's reason to be optimistic about the case's return to the Supreme Court.
Last week the Supreme Court announced it would revisit the important case of Horne v. USDA. The case centers on a USDA program that forces those who traffic in raisins ("handlers," in USDA raisin parlance) to turn over cash or a significant part of their crop—sometimes almost fifty percent—to the USDA without compensation.
There's reason to be optimistic about the case's return to the Supreme Court. Justices of all stripes are skeptical of the USDA program. During the 2012 hearing, Justice Elena Kagan suggested—correctly, as it turned out—that the Court might remand the case, which she said appeared to be either an unconstitutional taking or "just the world's most outdated law."
The program amounts to a choice between "[y]our raisins or your life," Justice Antonin Scalia joked during the same hearing, according to Baylen Linnekin.
