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USDA v. Horne [SCOTUS rules 9-0 against Obama seizing food from farmers]
Reason ^ | July 18, 2013 | Zach Weissmueller

Posted on 07/07/2014 11:47:30 AM PDT by grundle

"They want us to pay for our own raisins that we grew," says Raisin Valley Farms owner Marvin Horne. "We have to buy them back!"

This is but one absurdity that Marvin and his wife Laura have faced during their decade-long legal battle with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Every year, the Hornes plant seeds, tie vines, harvest fruit, and place grapes in paper trays to create sun-dried raisins. And every year, the federal government prevents them from bringing their full harvest to market.

It's called an agriculture marketing order. Depression-era regulations meant to stabilize crop prices endanger the livelihoods of small farmers across the country, but the raisin marketing order is particularly egregious. An elected board of bureaucrats known as the Raisin Administrative Committee decides what the proper yield should be in any given year in order to meet a previously decided-upon price. Once they can estimate the size of the year's harvest, they force every farmer to surrender a percentage of their crop...

The tipping point came in 2003, when farmers received zero dollars in return for the 47 percent of the crop they had surrendered.

Luckily for the Hornes, however, the Supreme Court took the case and ruled, in a 9-0 decision

(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...


TOPICS:
KEYWORDS: agdept; farmers; obama; propertyrights; scotus; usda
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1 posted on 07/07/2014 11:47:30 AM PDT by grundle
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To: grundle

Another 9-0!

I really hope this is a trend.


2 posted on 07/07/2014 11:49:47 AM PDT by left that other site (You shall know the Truth, and The Truth Shall Set You Free.)
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To: grundle
[SCOTUS rules 9-0 against Obama seizing food from farmers]

This is but one absurdity that Marvin and his wife Laura have faced during their decade-long legal battle with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

If their battle started in 2003, I don't think we can blame the policy on Obama.

3 posted on 07/07/2014 11:50:40 AM PDT by Sherman Logan (Perception wins all the battles. Reality wins all the wars.)
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To: grundle

I couldn’t understand why raisins had gotten so expensive lately. Now I do.


4 posted on 07/07/2014 11:50:52 AM PDT by beelzepug (You can't fix a broken washing machine by washing more expensive clothes in it.)
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To: grundle

And yet liberals want MORE government.


5 posted on 07/07/2014 11:51:27 AM PDT by Blood of Tyrants (Haven't you lost enough freedoms? Support an end to the WOD now.)
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To: grundle

This reminds of the Eddie Murphy movie Trading Places where the OJ futures were decided by few men


6 posted on 07/07/2014 11:51:58 AM PDT by Paul46360 (..)
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To: grundle

The article is from a year ago.


7 posted on 07/07/2014 11:53:09 AM PDT by Semper911 (When you want to rob Peter to pay Paul, you'll always have the support of Paul.)
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To: grundle
Luckily for the Hornes, however, the Supreme Court took the case and ruled, in a 9-0 decision

"Luckily"???

In a free country, justice is not a matter of "luck".

8 posted on 07/07/2014 11:53:24 AM PDT by NorthMountain
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To: grundle

The quote from the article cuts off at a point that leads to a misleading conclusion. SCOTUS ruled 9-0, but not on the validity of the marketing order. Rather, the Court ruled that the farmers can challenge the USDA’s proposed fine in federal district court, and do not have to first pay the fine and then challenge it in the Court of Claims. The validity of the program is still being litigated.


9 posted on 07/07/2014 11:53:58 AM PDT by Lurking Libertarian (Non sub homine, sed sub Deo et lege)
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To: NorthMountain

In a free country, justice SHOULD NOT BE a matter of luck.

Leftist control freak bureaucrats LOVE vagueness in the law - it’s where they can derive POWER from arbitrary application of the law.


10 posted on 07/07/2014 11:56:00 AM PDT by MrB (The difference between a Humanist and a Satanist - the latter admits whom he's working for)
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To: left that other site

It goes bacc to the 9th Circus for a ruling on Constitutionality.


11 posted on 07/07/2014 11:58:04 AM PDT by rllngrk33 (Things will continue getting worse until at least January 2017.)
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To: grundle

We need to rid ourselves of all Roosevelt’s communism


12 posted on 07/07/2014 11:58:22 AM PDT by Ray76 (True change requires true change - A Second Party ...or else it's more of the same...)
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To: grundle
[SCOTUS rules 9-0 against Obama seizing food from farmers]

This was going on long before Obama came into office.

13 posted on 07/07/2014 11:58:58 AM PDT by DoodleDawg
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To: MrB
I stand by my original statement.

The extent to which justice seems increasingly to be a matter of luck illustrates the extent to which these United States no longer form a free country.

Your comment on leftist bureaucrats is spot on. Control freak bureaucrats make for a non-free country. In their pathological extreme, they make for a bureaucratic tyranny, of which the Third Reich and the USSR were examples.

14 posted on 07/07/2014 11:59:04 AM PDT by NorthMountain
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To: Lurking Libertarian

“The validity of the program is still being litigated.”

If Congress was doing its job it would be eliminating these economy stifling outdated laws and defunding the agencies that administer them.

Every law passed should have a sunset provision forcing Congress to revisit it every 3-5 years.


15 posted on 07/07/2014 12:02:22 PM PDT by Soul of the South (Yesterday is gone. Today will be what we make of it.)
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To: Paul46360

There’s more of this than one cares to know.


16 posted on 07/07/2014 12:03:07 PM PDT by ThomasMore (Islam is the Whore of Babylon!)
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To: grundle

This is part of the same socialist FDR set of controls put on just about everything during the depression. They dumped milk, killed and buried livestock, burned grain and destroyed produce to suit the price and supply controls the progressive economists and sometimes non-economists thought would fit their ideas of fairness. Non-compliance meant jail time for the producers and possible confiscation of the farm. FDR and his minions did more to deepen the depression than anybody imagines.


17 posted on 07/07/2014 12:05:36 PM PDT by RJS1950 (The democrats are the "enemies foreign and domestic" cited in the federal oath)
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To: MrB
There is a flaw in our system of government somewhere.

We hire people to work for us.
They in many cases are indemnified from any errors in judgment that they make while working for us.
We are the ones indemnifying our public servants.
When they do harm to us, it is up to us to pay ourselves for any damage that our servants have done.
And they get away scot free for their errors in judgment.
They are then free to abuse us as they please as long as we can't prove they acted maliciously.

18 posted on 07/07/2014 12:08:51 PM PDT by oldbrowser (We have a rogue government in Washington)
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To: grundle

They won 9-0

What happens if the USDA decides to ignore SCOTUS?


19 posted on 07/07/2014 12:10:25 PM PDT by GeronL (Vote for Conservatives not for Republicans)
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To: grundle

What’s troubling about all of this is that there should be MANY OTHER decisions that came in 5-4 that should have also been 9-0.

Obamacare comes to mind.

‘Constitutional lawyer/expert’, my ass...


20 posted on 07/07/2014 12:11:01 PM PDT by DJ Frisat (Proudly providing the NSA with provocative textual content since 1995!)
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