There’s the PDF of the opinion of the court and its three dissenting opinions. Here’s a key part of the opinion from page 4
I haven’t read all of it. In fact, I haven’t read most of it yet. Feel free to do so yourself!
What confuses me is Chief Robert’s dissent (found on page 31), which doesn’t touch upon the merits of the case. Instead, he argues that the Court lacks jurisdiction to review this decision from the lower courts.
I don’t get that argument. The court granted Cert. Chief Roberts granted Cert! By doing so, he was giving the A-OK to the Court hearing this case. How can he then turn around and say “nope. We actually didn’t.”?
And Scalia saying that the Court lacked jurisdiction to hear a case? That’s fucking rich.
The granting of cert and jurisdiction are two different things.
Cert is just the discretionary decision to a review a case. The Court can review it in order to find that the court lacks jurisdiction, as it did today in the Prop 8 case. To put it another way, the Court always has jurisdiction to determine its own jurisdiction to decide the merits.
The Court’s jurisdiction to decide the merits is determined by Article III of the Constitution. The dissents’ argument is that there is no “case or controversy” when the President agrees that the statute is unconstitutional.
My most burning practical question of the moment is what this will mean in the near term for same-sex immigration to the U.S. My best guess is that it will work like first cousin marriage (which is legally valid in some states, but not all): if the marriage is legally valid in the state where the couple is residing, it will be valid for U.S. immigration purposes. How this will shake out, regulatory-wise, I have no clue, but it will take some time and be pretty messy in the meantime.
Not only am I not a lawyer, but I’m also pretty confused by most legalize.
Living in Georgia, what does this mean for me? Being that SSM is not legal here, what does the roadmap look like for me to actually be able to marry my partner in the future?
The four dissenting judges could have saved time by simply cribbing their notes from the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, mutatis mutandis.
In both cases, members of a comfortable majority were telling members of a despised minority: “YOU equal to ME? Fuck off!”
They could have quoted directly from the 1857 decision to say that gays are “so far inferior that they have no rights which the straight majority is bound to respect.”
Even if they write 2,000 pages of dissenting opinion, that is what it works out to.
You can get married in one of the states permitting same-sex marriage if you meet that state’s rules for who can marry there. That will entitle you to some of the federal rights made available by today’s ruling (the one’s based on where you got married), but not others (the ones based on whether your state recognizes your marriage).
Still, the Supremes ruling that discrimination against same sex couples is unconstitutional is going to be very hard for the remaining states to resist.
That will be an interesting follow-up case. But in the meantime, it would be nice for states that do have gay marriage to deny the validity of marriages from states that do not recognize gay marriage.
Why, O why do they allow Kennedy to write the opinion in these kinds of cases? His writing is average at best, and his legal analysis is all over the place. He simply meshes all these different ideas together in a big ball and declares DOMA violates the constitution, without the legal formalism that the Supreme Court should be using. It’s another Lawrence v. Texas (although Lawrence is a touch better than this one) of flexible legal analysis. Those kinds of opinions only give guys like Scalia ammo so his supporters can pretend he’s some kind of legal genius instead.
Scalia is, once again, the Rush Limbaugh of the Supreme Court. Alito’s opinion is so much better written, with much better legal analysis, than Scalia’s diatribe. It’s also wrong.
I don’t think the dissent does a very good job of making the argument that there wasn’t a case or controversy here. There was an adverse judgment below, there were two sides of the issue that were both briefed and argued well, and a legitimate interest in those sides. I understand the highly legalistic definition of “case or controversy” that they use, but I disagree there wasn’t one in this case.
Hopefully I’ll have some time later to get more in depth.
Since there isn’t a separate thread on the Prop 8 ruling yet, and I’m out of time, I’ll simply add that the biggest surprise in both these cases, the one thing that has me staring shocked at the opinion, is this part:
“ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which SCALIA, GINSBURG, BREYER, and KAGAN, JJ., joined. KENNEDY, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which THOMAS, ALITO, and SOTOMAYOR, JJ., joined.”
Seriously?! That’s more than I’d hoped for at this point. Now to break out the google-fu and try to find a Theios-Friendly description of what the Federal Protections/Responsibilities might be, since the state level stuff won’t apply to us at this point.
In the coming days there will be easy-to-understand charts put out by people at the ACLU, HRC, etc. I think James Esseks’s press conference today will touch on this stuff.
So is that maybe the next step, that a couple from Georgia (or wherever) will get married in New York, come back to Georgia, and sue the state of Georgia for state recognition? Everyone is busy celebrating the ruling right now, which I don’t begrudge anyone, but I’m really curious about what will happen next.
“It is an assertion of judicial supremacy over the people’s Representatives in Congress and the Executive. It envisions a Supreme Court standing (or rather enthroned) at the apex of government, empowered to decide all constitutional questions, always and everywhere “primary” in its role”
So, in 24 hours he went from second guessing congress for Voting Rights is all fine and dandy, but not when it comes to your dirty little places.
Is this level of cognitive dissonence mendacity or insanity at this point?
Scalia is just a big whiny titty baby who couldn’t make a coherent or logical argument that supported itself. He was the little Dutch boy trying to plug up the dike with his fat sausage fingers only to find his thoughts couldn’t be contained anymore and they just folded onto themselves. What a mess.