Backers of a wide range of programs promoting agricultural products breathed easier this week after a 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court decision upheld mandatory fees that fund the well-known “Beef: It’s what’s for dinner” campaign.
Such promotions are not funded by taxpayer dollars. Instead, beef producers voted in a referendum to assess themselves $1 on each head of cattle sold. The pork industry uses a similar self-assessment to promote its products, which a lower-court decision had declared unconstitutional. Thus, Monday’s decision in favor of the beef fees brightened the picture for pork as well as similar programs in the milk, egg, cotton and soybean industries.
In all, producers in 17 industries paid $693.2 million in mandatory fees in 2003. In the $170 billion beef business alone, producers and importers paid $83.6 million during 2003 for advertising, research and education. The Centennial-based National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which represents 1 million cattle farmers and ranchers, hailed the ruling.
Even though the fees are only assessed if a majority of producers votes to do so, some dissenting cattle producers had claimed that the program violated the First Amendment by compelling them to pay for speech with which they disagreed. The dissidents cited earlier Supreme Court rulings that absolved workers from having to fund political activities by their unions and lawyers from having to pay for political work by their bar associations.
But the majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia said the beef program was different from those other cases, which involved political speech, because the fees supported a valid program of “government speech,” directed by the Agriculture Department.
“The message set out in the beef promotions is from beginning to end the message established by the federal government,” Scalia concluded.
That means dissenting producers who don’t like the fees can be required to pay them anyway, just like losing voters in any election must pay the taxes approved by the majority.
In 2001, the high court ruled the government couldn’t force mushroom growers to pay for promotional advertising because those ads weren’t part of a broader government effort to regulate that market. Scalia’s new ruling thus returns the high court to the position it took in 1997, when it upheld mandatory fees to promote California peaches, plums and nectarines because they were part of a broader marketing effort. In our view, it is a reasonable formula, allowing industries to assess themselves for promotional purposes – as long as they do not use taxpayer funds for that purpose.
