The Federalist has what it describes as Justice John Roberts 11 most devastating quotes from his dissent on the recent SCOTUS Gay Marriage decision.
They are all excellent observations. They do make the majority argument look silly. But you have to wonder where this Justice Roberts was when they were handing out the decisions in King v. Burwell.
I say that because neither decision, regardless of what issue they decided, is based on rule of law, or any Constitution I am familiar with, yet this dissent from Roberts speaks to both the rule of law, constitutions–and the separation of powers (to add insult to injury). So where was this man when confronted with the very plain language “passed” in ObamaCare by the law-making branch and signed in to law by the law enforcing branch?
On the proper role of the federal judiciary:
[T]his Court is not a legislature. Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us. Under the Constitution, judges have power to say what the law is, not what it should be. The people who ratified the Constitution authorized courts to exercise “neither force nor will but merely judgment.
Nowhere is the majority’s extravagant conception of judicial supremacy more evident than in its description—and dismissal—of the public debate regarding same-sex marriage. Yes, the majority concedes, on one side are thousands of years of human history in every society known to have populated the planet. But on the other side, there has been “extensive litigation,” “many thoughtful District Court decisions,” “countless studies, papers, books, and other popular and scholarly writings,” and “more than 100” amicus briefs in these cases alone. What would be the point of allowing the democratic process to go on? It is high time for the Court to decide the meaning of marriage, based on five lawyers’ “better informed understanding” of “a liberty that remains urgent in our own era.” The answer is surely there in one of those amicus briefs or studies.
The truth is that today’s decision rests on nothing more than the majority’s own conviction that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry because they want to, and that “it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right.” Whatever force that belief may have as a matter of moral philosophy, it has no more basis in the Constitution than did the naked policy preferences adopted in Lochner.
