If this Supreme Court were considering the issue for the very first time today, it would almost certainly hold that the Constitution does not protect same-sex marriage by a 6–3 vote. But now that Obergefell is entrenched as precedent, and widely supported by Americans, they’ve shown no appetite for spending down their political capital to issue an unpopular ruling that could only hurt the Republican Party.
This seems like a really naive thing to say about this court. They have shown no qualms about striking down much older cases with a stronger history of precedent than Obergefell on the most specious of reasoning. They struck down Chevron Deference last year, which was in place since 1984 and had come to form the backbone of judicial handling about highly technical aspects of government regulation of virtually every industry.
And they have no hesitation about making unpopular rulings. Several justices have a habit of lecturing the public in a way that’s essentially talking down to the people they are supposed to serve and say they simply know what’s better for the people than… the people. Their egos couldn’t care less about their public image; Chief Justice John Roberts has spoken out multiple times that people need to basically shut up and respect the court’s decisions no matter if they like them or not.
It’s a higher level of infuriating that the court is so obviously corrupt, and then the most corrupt among them present themselves as fundamentally more deserving of respect and deference than the common rabble.
And they’re being redeployed to Charlotte, NC, and New Orleans, LA. They’re continuing the tactic of blitzing whatever they want to do somewhere, and when the courts start to catch up, they pull out and start to do something else somewhere else. They can do whatever they want, legality be damned, if they accomplish their goals before the courts wake up. This is guerrilla warfare applied to the legal checks and balances between the branches of government.