One year later: a reflection on Prop 8 and DOMA from ‘The Campaign’ director Christie Herring
Nearly a year ago, Prop 8 and DOMA bit the dust.
Continue 6 Comments June 10, 2014
Filed under: Supreme Court
‘It feels different’: The Prop 8 plaintiffs talk winning, wedding and what comes next
EqualityOnTrial caught up with Jeff Zarrillo and Paul Katami, two of the plaintiffs in the Proposition 8 case to return marriage equality to California, one month after their historic Supreme Court win. The couple talked about their wedding and what they look forward to both in their lives and for the LGBT community at large. At the center of the conversation was one simple theme: it was bigger than us.
Supreme Court rejects Prop 8 defenders’ request for emergency stay
By Jacob Combs
In the midst of this weekend’s celebrations in California and across the country, the Prop 8 case experienced one (probably) final hiccup.
It began on Friday afternoon, when we reported that the Ninth Circuit panel that invalidated Prop 8 in February of last year unexpectedly lifted its stay on Judge Vaughn Walker’s lower court ruling striking down the law and instructing California officials not to enforce it.
As we discussed last Wednesday, the proponents of Prop 8, as the losing party before the Supreme Court, have a 25-day window during which they may petition the high court for rehearing of its decision in the Prop 8 case. (As SCOTUSblog’s Tom Goldstein noted, that 25-day window lasts until July 21, a Sunday, meaning that Monday, July 22 is the actual final date to file such a petition.) Until that time, although such petitions are almost never granted, the judgment is technically not final.
Despite the fact that the Supreme Court’s decision in the Prop 8 case is not yet technically in effect, the Ninth Circuit has wide discretion over decisions regarding its own stay orders. Not surprisingly, when the stay was lifted on Friday, same-sex couples in California flocked to city halls to get married–including the two plaintiff couples in the Prop 8 challenge: Kris and Sandy and Jeff and Paul.
On Saturday, Andrew Pugno and lawyers with the Nevada-based Alliance Defending Freedom, which had represented the proponents of Prop 8, submitted a brief with the Supreme Court seeking an emergency order vacating the Ninth Circuit’s decision to lift the stay. The Ninth Circuit, the lawyers argued, lacked jurisdiction to issue its order lifting the stay, violated the stay order in lifting it and effectively deprived Prop 8’s defenders to the opportunity to petition for a Supreme Court rehearing.
Less than 24 hours later, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, the circuit justice for the Ninth Circuit, denied the request without comment. As SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston noted, there is essentially no way of knowing what legal rationale Justice Kennedy used in making his determination. Denniston also wryly pointed out the implicit irony in Kennedy’s action, given that he was in the four-justice minority who voted to allow Prop 8’s proponents to defend the law in court.
The proponents’ failure to obtain an emergency stay from the Supreme Court could likely be the last federal court proceeding in the case. The proponents still have until July 22 to file a petition for rehearing, but it looks exceedingly unlikely that such a request would be approved.
Of course, the proponents could also attempt to challenge the scope of Judge Walker’s injunction, which some have argued was overly broad and should not have been effective statewide. Most legal observers find that argument unpersuasive, and now that marriages have begun across California, it seems a stretch that anything could roll back that development.
Still, the proponents of Prop 8 have been tenacious in their defense of the law. Of course, we’ll have coverage of any and all attempts they make to postpone what at this point is essentially inevitable.
3 Comments July 1, 2013
A round-up of reactions to yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions
By Jacob Combs
Win McNamee/Getty Images
In the wake of yesterday’s historic Supreme Court rulings striking down the Defense of Marriage Act and setting the stage for marriage equality to return to California, equal rights advocates celebrated, opponents scowled, and–of course–marriages were proposed. Here’s a quick look at the myriad reactions to the Court’s rulings.
First, the good. At a press conference yesterday following the ruling, when asked about her reaction to the decision, a smiling California Attorney General Kamala Harris said, “I’m feeling pretty good,” telling the crowd that marriage equality is coming back to California:
“As soon as [the 9th Circuit] lifts that stay, marriages are on. The wedding bells will ring … Today is a day that reaffirms our commitment as a country to giving every person equal protection and due process under the law.”
During the press conference, Harris asked the Ninth Circuit to expedite its process of lifting the stay on Judge Walker’s injunction against the enforcement of Proposition 8. An official with the circuit court told the Los Angeles Times the court had not received any paperwork asking for the process to be sped up.
Writing on his blog Blabbeando, Andrés Duque shared a wonderful image of Thomas Verni, the New York City Police Department’s LGBT community liaison, kissing his partner Joe Moran shortly after proposing to him in the West Village.
True to form, Michelle Bachmann decried the Supreme Court’s rulings, issuing the following statement: “Marriage was created by the hand of God. No man, not even a Supreme Court, can undo what a holy God has instituted.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had the best reaction, hands down, to that sentiment, when asked by a reporter what she thought of it: “Who cares?”
Rachel Maddow had thorough coverage of the day’s decisions, featuring interviews with the plaintiffs from a celebration in West Hollywood and a sit down with Edie Windsor’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, in the MSNBC studios.
The Daily Show’s John Oliver–standing in for Jon Stewart–waved a giant rainbow flag as he sang a few modified strains of ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’ from Les Misérables, while Jason Jones and Al Madrigal prepared to marry in what Oliver described as ‘a 1980s stereotype.’
And, of course, there were the negative reactions. Speaking with a New Jersey radio station, Governor Chris Christie–who last year vetoed a marriage equality bill approved by the state’s legislature–railed against the end of DOMA and Prop 8:
I don’t think the ruling was appropriate. I think it was wrong. They, the Court, without a basis in standing, substituted their own judgment for the judgment of a Republican Congress and a Democratic President. In the Republican Congress in the ‘90s and Bill Clinton. I thought that Justice Kennedy’s opinion was, in many respects, incredibly insulting to those people, 340-some members of Congress who voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, and Bill Clinton.
Finally, Tim Heulskamp, a Republican representative from Kansas, said that he would introduce a new Federal Marriage Amendment by the end of this week which would essentially write a new DOMA into the U.S. Constitution. Such a move, he told the Huffington Post, would “trump the Constitution.” It’s a hail-mary move with almost no chance of passing: in 2006, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, the bill failed to secure the votes it needed to pass.
2 Comments June 27, 2013
Analysis: Supreme Court rules Prop 8 proponents lack standing, restores marriage equality to California
By Jacob Combs
In a narrow yet major victory for marriage equality, the Supreme Court ruled today that the proponents of Proposition 8 did not have standing to defend the law in Court, paving the way for equal marriage rights to return to California. The ruling focused specifically on issues of standing, but will allow a lower court ruling that invalidated Prop 8 as unconstitutional to stand as the final say on the issue.
First, the ruling itself, which was written by Chief Justice Roberts and joined by an unusual coalition of Justices Scalia, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan. As the Chief Justice noted early in his opinion, “Federal courts have authority under the Constitution to answer such questions [of constitutionality] only if necessary to do so in the course of deciding an actual ‘case’ or ‘controversy.’ … It ensures that we act as judges, and do not engage in policymaking properly left to elected representatives.”
To briefly rehash the history of the Prop 8 challenge, the original lawsuit was brought by two same-sex couples who had been denied marriage licenses by their county clerks. When California’s governor and attorney general declined to defend Prop 8 in court, the measure’s official ballot proponents stepped in to defend the law. The two couples succeeded in winning a district court ruling that Prop 8 was unconstitutional, and the proponents appealed to the Ninth Circuit, where they lost, and then to the Supreme Court.
The central question in today’s Prop 8 decision is whether or not the proponents had the right–known technically as Article III standing–to defend Prop 8 in federal court. In order to do so, the Chief Justice wrote, the proponents would have had to assert “a concrete and particularized injury that is fairly traceable to the challenged conduct, and is likely to be redressed by a favorable judicial decision.” As he wrote in his opinion today, Roberts determined them unable to do so:
The only individuals who sought to appeal that order were petitioners, who had intervened in the District Court. But the District Court had not ordered them to do or refrain from doing anything…. Their only interest in having the District Court order reversed was to vindicate the constitutional validity of a generally applicable California law.
In court, the Prop 8 proponents argued that even if they did not have an individual, particularized interest in defending the law, they were authorized to represent California’s own interest in the constitutionality of the measure, relying in large part on a 2011 California Supreme Court ruling that staked out this argument.
Roberts disagreed with that holding, citing the 1991 holding in Powers v. Ohio that “a litigant must assert his or her own legal rights and interests, and cannot rest a claim to relief on the legal rights or interests of third parties.” He distinguished the Prop 8 litigation from a case from New Jersey called Karcher v. May in which New Jersey state legislators were permitted to defend a law after the state’s attorney general refused to do so, writing that the Supreme Court specifically ruled those legislators lost the right to defend the law after they left office.
Roberts also cited a passage from the Court’s ruling in Arizonans for Official English to refute the proponents’ arguments based on the California Supreme Court ruling, writing that the state court’s decision answered only whether the proponents had “the authority to assert the State’s interest in the initiative’s validity” and did not authorize them to act “‘as agents of the people’ of California.”
Dissenting from Chief Justice Roberts’s majority ruling, Justice Kennedy–joined by Justices Thomas, Alito and Sotomayor, repeatedly asserted that the Supreme Court should have accepted the California Supreme Court’s arguments and granted standing to the proponents:
[T]he State Supreme Court’s definition of proponents’ powers is binding on this Court. And that definition is fully sufficient to establish the standing and adversity that are requisites for justiciability under Article III of the United States Constitution.
In his conclusion, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Court would not change its previous holdings on ballot proponents’ standing, and sent the Prop 8 case back to the lower courts:
We have never before upheld the standing of a private party to defend the constitutionality of a state statute when state officials have chosen not to. We decline to do so for the first time here.
Because petitioners have not satisfied their burden to demonstrate standing to appeal the judgment of the District Court, the Ninth Circuit was without jurisdiction to consider the appeal. The judgment of the Ninth Circuit is vacated, and the case is remanded with instructions to dismiss the appeal for lack of jurisdiction.
This last paragraph of the ruling means that the Ninth Circuit’s decision invalidating Prop 8 is essentially nullified, since the proponents did not have standing to appeal to the circuit court in the first place. Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision, then, is now the final ruling on the law, and will apply only to California.
Some have argued that the Supreme Court’s decision should only affect the two couples who filed suit against Prop 8, or the two counties in which the couples reside, because the suit wasn’t brought on behalf of California’s same-sex couples as a class. This argument has little merit: Judge Walker’s district court injunction was worded to apply to California’s governor and attorney general, as well as all of the state officials under their authority.
In a statement following the ruling, California Governor Jerry Brown announced in plain terms that ” the district court’s injunction against Proposition 8 applies statewide and that all county clerks and county registrar/recorders must comply with it.” This determination was based on a legal opinion from the office of California Attorney General Kamala Harris.
There is a 25-day window during which a petition for rehearing can be filed with the Supreme Court, although such petitions are rarely granted. After that time, the Supreme Court’s opinion will become official and its instruction to the Ninth Circuit to lift its stay against Judge Walker’s injunction will be in effect. The Ninth Circuit could choose on its own accord to lift the stay before that 25-day window has shut, which would allow same-sex couples in California to wed even sooner. In either case, marriages should return to California within a month’s time.
We’ll have continued coverage of the Prop 8 case in the next few days and Scottie will be posting an in-depth analysis of the DOMA ruling later this afternoon. Congratulations, California!
1 Comment June 26, 2013
BREAKING: Prop 8 proponents did not have standing to defend law, Supreme Court rules
By Jacob Combs, Scottie Thomaston and Adam Bink
The big news continues: The Supreme Court has ruled that the official ballot proponents of Prop 8 did not have standing to defend the law in Court. That means the Court did not rule on the law’s constitutionality, and instead sent the case back to the Ninth Circuit to dismiss the appeal for lack of standing. District Court judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling will thus be the final say in the Perry case.
Here’s the money quote from the opinion in Hollingsworth v. Perry:
We have never before upheld the standing of a private party to defend the constitutionality of a state statute when state officials have chosen not to. We decline to do so for the first time here.
Because petitioners have not satisfied their burden to demonstrate standing to appeal the judgment of the District Court, the Ninth Circuit was without jurisdiction to consider the appeal. The judgment of the Ninth Circuit is vacated, and the case is remanded with instructions to dismiss the appeal for lack of jurisdiction.
And again, from Kathleen, a Scribd embed of the opinion:
[scribd id=149959833 key=key-kjpsr6uukuusq8708ml mode=scroll]
This is a breaking news post. For further updates and reactions, follow us on our Supreme Court decision day liveblog.
4 Comments June 26, 2013
