A Stitch in Haste

The Supreme Court handed down two very troubling decisions today.

First, a case I had not been following closely, Johanns v. Livestock Marketing Association, challenged a law requiring cattle ranchers to pay a special tax to fund government-run pro-beef advertising. The Court held that such a law was not compelled speech. If the tax is compulsory, and the tax directly funds speech, then, um, how can it not be "compelled speech"? And why it's any of the government's business advertising beef remains unaddressed. Opinion here (PDF - 38 pages).

Second, and even more depressing, the Court took one more step toward abolishing any restriction on the use of eminent domain. While everybody has been focused on the monumental case, Kelo v. New London, I had reminded readers that another case, Lingle v. Chevron, was also before the Court. At issue in that Takings Clause case was whether a permanent cap on what rent gas station owners (i.e., big oil company) could charge its tenants (i.e., little gas station owner) was a "taking" that required just compensation under the Fifth Amendment. The Court said no. Note that Lingle was in a sense a private-to-private transfer of the property's value, essentially the very question presented in Kelo. That, coupled with the read-through from the Court's just-plain-wrong wine decision (i.e., that an implicit doctrine can trump explicit and unambiguous constitutional text), pretty much leaves absolutely no room for optimism on Kelo. Opinion here (PDF - 23 pages).

UDPATE: Mike at Crime & Federaism echoes my thoughts in a good post and then extends the reasoning to the medical marijuana case, Ashcroft v. Raich (or is it Gonzales v. Raich now?). As I said in this post about the interstate wine cases, it all circles back to the Jurisprudence of Sorta Kinda: principles such as "public use" or "interstate commerce" or "in violation of the laws thereof" no longer have any objective meaning, but only have "sorta kinda" their plain meaning. And that's bad news for libertarians.