Supreme Court strikes down federal raisin program as unconstitutional

Richard Wolf | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Score one for the little guy.

The Supreme Court sided with a renegade raisin farmer Monday in his battle against a federal program designed to keep excess raisins off the market.

A majority of justices ruled that the Agriculture Department program, which seizes excess raisins from producers in order to prop up market prices during bumper crop years, amounted to an unconstitutional government "taking."

But they limited their verdict to raisins, lest they simultaneously overturn other government programs that limit production of goods without actually seizing private property.

The 8-1 decision was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, with the court's more conservative justices in solid agreement. Roberts said the government violates citizens' rights when it seizes personal property -- say, a car -- as well as real property such as a house.

While the government can regulate production in order to keep goods off the market, the chief justice said it cannot seize that property without compensation.

"Selling produce in interstate commerce ... (is) n ot a special governmental benefit that the government may hold hostage, to be ransomed by the waiver of constitutional protection," Roberts said. "Raisins are not dangerous pesticides; they are a healthy snack."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, while Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan would have allowed the lower court to reconsider the issue.

The raisin program, which dates back to the Truman administration, was vigorously defended by the Obama administration as a win-win proposition. Prices remain high for farmers, and their excess raisins can be donated to school lunch programs or sold overseas. If profits exceed administrative costs, the farmers share in the excess.

Nearly all the nation's raisins are grown in California, and the battle against the program was waged by raisin farmer Marvin Horne of Fresno. He was fined $695,000 for refusing to comply with the program since 2002.

Roberts would have none of that. "The Hornes 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," he wrote for the court's majority. "This case, in litigation for more than a decade, has gone on long enough."

Horne's lawyer, Stanford University law professor Michael McConnell, argued that the government must pay him for the raisins under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits that "private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

During oral argument, he had the court's conservative justices eating out of his hand, while U.S. deputy solicitor general Edwin Kneedler's argument was treated like sour grapes.

"You come up with the truck, and you get the shovels, and you take their raisins, probably in the dark of night," Roberts lectured Kneedler.

His ruling was heralded by business groups. "We believe it protects businesses far beyond the agricultural industry," said Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business' small business legal center.

The court's liberal justices defended the program's intent, but some acknowledged it may be outdated. It was used most recently during the bumper crop years of 2003-04; in one of those years, growers were blocked from selling 47% of the crop.

Three of them, led by Breyer, agreed with the bulk of Roberts' ruling but wanted the case sent back to a federal appeals court to decide whether the benefits of higher market prices constitute compensation for the forfeited raisins.

Justice Clarence Thomas, in a separate opinion, said that would be "a fruitless exercise."

In the end, only Sotomayor refused to call the government's action a form of taking. She said that definition "only applies where all property rights have been destroyed by governmental action." Here, she said, the Hornes retained some property rights.