The Apocalypse? Or Is It Just Me?

[furtech]

Very happy for many of my friends with regards to the Supreme Court decisions regarding marriage. Mazel tov!

However...when I read who was on the majority of the Prop. 8 decision, my brain exploded.

Scalia and Roberts helping to strike down Prop. 8??!WTF?

Kennedy and Sotomayor dissenting??!?

If there were a betting pool, I SO would have lost money with any combination of judges I would have thought possible.

Now, the HuffPost did explain:
If March's oral arguments were any indication, the justices' unusual alliances on Wednesday -- Scalia and Roberts with three liberals in the majority and Sotomayor joining Kennedy and two conservatives in dissent -- would have realigned to their usual ideological divides had they at all even noted Proposition 8's constitutional merits in their opinions.

Still...if anyone has a *simple* explanation for this juxtaposition of judges, I'd love to hear it.

Comments

[slave-to-anime.livejournal.com]

It's totally because the judgement on the case was very technical. The case wasn't decided on the merits of the arguments. It was thrown out because the defendants didn't have standing to defend the law. That's more of an institutional judgement rather than a constitutional one.

Sotomayor probably joined the dissent because she believed the court had reasonable ground to stand on, though it'a good bet she would've wanted to then kill it dead outright. Scalia and Roberts went with the majority because it would be precedent setting to allow someone who had no legal standing in a case to try to act as defense (keeping in mind that the normal defenders of the law should've been the state of CA & Kamala Harris, who opted not to defend the law). It's also far easier to kick out a case on a technicality than it is to make a broad sweeping ruling.

[furtech.livejournal.com]

This sums up nicely what I did get out of the news reports. I think what I was missing was the politics/strategies within strategies.