Pigs Hold Court Stirring Up Constitutional Crisis

In 2018, California voters overwhelmingly enacted one of the strongest farm animal protection laws in the U.S., giving egg-laying hens, mother pigs, and veal calves more room to stretch their legs. Proposition 12 not only bans housing animals in cages, it also forbids out-of-state caged animal meat from being sold in California.

The National Pork Producers Council challenged the Proposition all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing it violates the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause. When the conservative majority coalesced with the liberal minority and affirmed the lower court’s decision to keep pigs out of pens, it stirred rumblings of a new constitutional crisis in an already much divided nation. Find out why in Politico.