Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders want to block a Kroger-Albertsons grocery empire with a campaign against the company’s grocery price fixing.
They want to stop the price fixing.
Who says the U.S. Supreme Court can’t do anything about that?
That is, until the justices decide to take on the role.
The U.S. Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, is usually asked to step in when it has a problem but not when it needs to solve one.
And that’s exactly what justices are likely to do when they turn their attention to a grocery price fixing case now at the center of a battle among U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.
That’s because the Supreme Court’s most-recently announced agenda item that most directly addresses price-fixing took place on July 30 when the court agreed to take up a case from a group of state and local governments. They had just argued a preliminary appeal in the case in front of the justices.
The justices decided after the argument that it should be argued in October.
But there’s something significant about the case’s timing that might explain why the Supreme Court justices have decided to take it up at all.
The case that the states and four cities want the Supreme Court to hear is likely to be important to more than the current grocery price fixing case.
In other words, the justices may only be addressing one aspect of a broader, much bigger, problem.
What is the Supreme Court trying to do?
When the justices consider the law, the law always takes precedence over any competing value judgments.
When it comes to a grocery price fixing dispute, that’s especially important because the justices are considering a law that is based on the Constitution — specifically, the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.
The Commerce Clause, as we