The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in a case that could put climate, public health, and animal welfare regulations across the United States on the chopping block. The case is a pork industry challenge to the constitutionality of a California animal welfare law in a case.
It could ultimately undermine the power of states to regulate a range of issues within their own borders.
The National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation are appealing a lower court’s decision to throw out their lawsuit seeking to invalidate a 2018 ballot initiative passed by voters barring sales in California of pork, veal, and eggs from animals whose confinement failed to meet minimum space requirements.
California’s Proposition 12 is a law that bans the sale of meat and eggs from animals raised using certain kinds of extreme confinement.
The law bans gestation crates, which are metal enclosures where pregnant pigs are kept for most of their lives that are so small that they can’t turn around or stretch their limbs.
The crates are standard practice in the pork industry even though, according to a supreme court brief filed by 378 veterinarians and animal welfare scientists, they “cause profound, avoidable suffering and deprive pigs of a minimally acceptable level of welfare”.
The pork industry has been fighting the California law since it passed by ballot in 2018. It passed with more than 62 percent of the vote.
All of the pork industry’s legal challenges to Prop 12 so far have been unsuccessful, but in March, the supreme court agreed to hear its case.
The pork industry wants the law thrown out, arguing that it violates a provision of the U.S. Constitution known as the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce, by requiring out-of-state producers to comply or face a California sales ban.
Proponents of the law disagree, saying California has the right to set standards for products sold to its consumers regardless of where these are produced.
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