The Obama administration is once again championing Uncle Sam's sacred right to seize farmers' harvests. After being trounced on procedural grounds at the Supreme Court in 2013, the Justice Department wants the Supremes to uphold a recent appeals court decision that raisin confiscations are no violation of property rights. However, the Obama administration is misleading the court on whether raisin producers still support the oppressive regime.

This case began in 2002, when the Agriculture Department's Raisin Administrative Committee prohibited producers from selling 47 percent of their raisin harvest in order to drive up raisin prices as part of a "reserve" scheme. The following year, the raisin committee decreed that producers must forfeit 30 percent of their harvest to the raisin committee. Marvin and Laura Horne, raisin growers in Kerman, Calif., refused to submit, and the Agriculture Department slapped them with more than $700,000 in fines.

The Hornes' legal challenge has been percolating ever since. When the Supreme Court heard a procedural dispute over this case in 2013, Justice Stephen Breyer declared: "I can't believe that Congress wanted the taxpayers to pay for a program that's going to mean they have to pay higher prices as consumers." Justice Elena Kagan suggested that the 1937 statute authorizing the raisin cartel could be "the world's most outdated law."

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the government last May, effectively declaring that a taking is not a taking if the feds intend to benefit the victim. The appeals court downplayed the Hornes' losses because they only involved "personal property" — not "real property" such as land. The decision stressed that "the Hornes did not lose all economically valuable use of their personal property," presumably since the feds did not take all their raisins.