Faithful readers of this blog will have noticed that the government lost unanimously before the Supreme Court in yesterday’s quirky raisin case (which Ilya Somin points out is the government’s third unanimous property‐​rights loss in 15 months). Even more keen Cato followers will have realized that this ruling comes on the heels of three other unanimous government losses this term, which I described in a Bloomberg View op‐​ed last week. And my biggest fans (hi Dad!) will have remembered that this continues a seeming pattern — not sure if statistically significant, but does look anomolous — that I chronicled in a Wall Street Journal op‐​ed a year ago.


As I said last week,

These cases have nothing in common, other than the government’s view that federal power is virtually unlimited: Citizens must subsume their liberty to whatever the experts in a given field determine the best or most useful policy to be.


If the government can’t get even one of the liberal justices to agree with it on any of these unrelated cases, it should realize there’s something seriously wrong with its constitutional vision.

I wonder if I’ll get to write the same op‐​ed every year at this time.