Comment

US and China Announce Historic Agreement on Climate Change

182
goddamnedfrank11/12/2014 2:57:58 pm PST
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2014
ORDER IN PENDING CASE
14A503 MOSER, ROBERT, ET AL. V. MARIE, KAIL, ET AL.
The application for stay presented to Justice Sotomayor and
by her referred to the Court is denied. The order heretofore
entered by Justice Sotomayor is vacated.
Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas would grant the
application for stay.

This looks pretty bad for opponents of SSM. If Alito, Roberts or Kennedy had any mind to affirm the Sixth Circuit ruling they probably would have also supported a continued stay in Kansas as well. Instead Scalia and Thomas are out there alone as the only Justices willing to go on record as opposed to ending the stay. I have a very hard time thinking that Roberts and Kennedy especially would have allowed so many marriages to go forward in States that enacted specific bans against SSM, and to ignore every Circuit Appeals ruling against those bans, only to much later rule in favor of the Sixth Circuit’s fucked up reasoning that such bans are okay.

Roberts, while pretty steadily conservative, is especially invested in the reputation of his Court for consistency and reliability. Probably the last thing he wants as his legacy is the idea that he needlessly played games with people’s lives. He almost certainly will not yank the rug out from under families who were granted legal marriages by the deliberate and explicit inaction of his Court. And he cannot uphold the Sixth Circuit ruling without creating two classes of same sex couples, those who married before the Supreme Court chose to get involved, and those who didn’t.