Wise Sentient Spider Convinces Supreme Court To Uphold California Anti-Cruelty Law

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a California law aimed at reducing cruelty in meat production, in a decision holding that California can indeed require that pork sold in the state come from pigs born from sows who have enough room to both turn around and lie down. The pork industry had fought the law, pointing out that California produces almost no pork itself, but consumes about 13 percent of all the pork eaten in this great pork-eating nation. In essence, the pork producers argued that California violated the Constitution’s commerce clause by passing a law whose burden falls almost entirely on farms in other states. But because it doesn’t give California or any other state an unfair competitive advantage, among other things, the majority decided California’s law is kosher, even though it concerns meat that’s treyf.

In a narrow 5 to 4 decision that scrambled the usual partisan lineup of justices, Neil Gorsuch, whom you’d usually expect to line up obediently with corporate interests, wrote, “While the Constitution addresses many weighty issues, the type of pork chops California merchants may sell is not on that list.” Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan agreed only partly with Gorsuch’s decision, which they believed claimed too limited a role for the Court to take in such cases; Sotomayor wrote in a partial concurrence that the pork producers had at the very least failed to show “a substantial burden on interstate commerce,” so they lose, neener neener. (We paraphrase slightly.)

The law at the center of the case is California’s 2018 ballot initiative Proposition 12, which was aimed at limiting the abuse of animals in factory farms. It bans cruel confinement of “veal calves, breeding pigs, and egg-laying hens,” requiring that they be allowed to move more freely and specifying the amount of space provided for the animals. The case the Court decided on, National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, concerns only the section on pigs, which, as the AP explains, says that

pork sold in the state needs to come from pigs whose mothers were raised with at least 24 square feet of space, with the ability to lie down and turn around. That rules out confined “gestation crates,” metal enclosures that are common in the pork industry.

The pork industry said that the law was unfair because nearly all the pork sold in California comes from producers in other states, particularly the Midwest, and that factory farms simply can’t afford to provide sows anything like what Prop 12 requires. Again, from the AP:

Pork producers argued that 72% of farmers use individual pens for sows that do not allow them to turn around and that even farmers who house sows in larger group pens do not provide the space California would require.

They also say that the way the pork market works, with cuts of meat from various producers being combined before sale, it is likely all pork would have to meet California standards, regardless of where it is sold. Complying with Proposition 12 could cost the industry $290 million to $350 million, they said.

This is where we googled “pork industry profits” and found a pork industry press release exclaiming that the pork biz “contributed $57 billion in value-added GDP” to the US economy in 2022, and while we recognize that’s not all profit, we think maybe Big Pig might not be devastated by having to provide minimally humane conditions for sows if the industry wants to sell pork in California.

The justices wrangled over a legal principle called the “dormant Commerce Clause,” which prohibits states from enacting laws that give themselves an unfair competitive advantage, like if Idaho were to ban the sale of products from states where women have too many damn rights. Since Prop 12 is in no way protectionist — there’s really no California pork industry to protect anyway — that principle remains dormant, kind of like dead Cthulhu, dreaming in R’lyeh. So even if other states’ pork producers may have to incur new costs to sell pork in California, they remain on an equal footing, kind of like sows that will now be allowed to move around more freely.

Gorsuch wrote that the people of California are free to pass laws that reflect their flaky Birkenstock-wearing values, even if he thinks they’re kind of goofy, and that’s how it ought to be:

On the one hand, some out-of-state producers who choose to comply with Proposition 12 may incur new costs. On the other hand, the law serves moral and health interests of some (disputable) magnitude for in-state residents. Some might reasonably find one set of concerns more compelling. Others might fairly disagree. How should we settle that dispute? The competing goods are incommensurable. Your guess is as good as ours.

More accurately, your guess is better than ours. In a functioning democracy, policy choices like these usually belong to the people and their elected representatives.

So in this case at least, states’ rights yay, as California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement following the ruling, which he said

“affirms states’ important role in regulating goods sold within their borders” and that it “means that California can continue to have in place humane and commonsense standards, instead of the extreme confinement pushed by some pork producers.”

The Court has so far not weighed in on whether a hot dog is a “sandwich” or not.

[National Pork Producers Council v. Ross / AP / NYT / Constitutional Accountability Center]

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