The Cato Institute, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, and the Reason Foundation have filed an amicus brief in Horne v. United States, No. 12-123 (cert. petition filed July 25, 2012).
This is the case in which the petitioners argue that they are entitled to raise the Takings Clause as a defense to the government's assertion that they are raisin "handlers," and thus required to turn over a huge percentage of their raisin crop to the government without compensation. We posted the cert petition here.
As the Cato@Liberty blog details:
Property owners shouldn’t be made to suffer a needless, Rube Goldberg-style litigation process to vindicate their constitutional rights. Yet that is exactly what the U.S. Department of Agriculture seeks to impose on independent raisin farmers Marvin and Laura Horne when they protested the enforcement of a USDA "marketing order" that demanded that the Hornes turn over 47 percent of their crop without compensation....We argue that an unjustified monetary order is inherently a taking without just compensation and that a ruling to the contrary imposes a pointless burden on property owners, particularly when the government initiated the original proceeding.We also encourage the Court to reconsider Williamson County, noting that the text and history of the Takings Clause don’t permit the government to defer compensation—that indeed the most natural reading of the Takings Clause demands that compensation be offered as a prerequisite to government action. Just as the Court wouldn’t permit the government to seize property without some prior "due process of law," it shouldn’t permit the government to seize property without prior "just compensation."
Read the entire post here. Well worth it.
