Thursday passed with no movement from the Supreme Court on the seven same-sex marriage petitions before them.
Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog believes there is a decent chance the Court will pick up a case since it has temporarily blocked lower court rulings on three occasions earlier this year:]
Those orders suggest, if they don’t actually prove, that the Court is preserving either a chance for the issue to be explored further in lower courts without thousands of new same-sex marriages occurring, or a chance for the Justices themselves to weigh in on the issue before that happens.
Moreover, it would only take the votes of four Justices to grant review of any one of the seven new petitions, and there are four Justices who strenuously objected in dissent last year when the Court struck down a key part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act — a ruling that actually set off nearly three-dozen rulings by lower federal courts, striking down (with only one exception) state bans on such marriages.
Denniston adds that the four justices who dissented when Section 3 of DOMA was struck down last year may be looking for a way to convince another justice to come to their side on one of these cases, and also that if they deny review of the cases it would set in motion a string of decisions that would bring marriage equality to an additional 11 states.
So, after the silence on Thursday, the focus now turns to Monday. The new list of orders, mostly denials, will emerge first and, before the end of the day, the Court will indicate whether it is rescheduling the same-sex marriage cases for another look, at a private Conference set for next Friday morning.
After that Conference, it is expected, any orders granting new cases probably will not be publicly announced until the following Tuesday, October 14 (after a federal holiday the day before).
Our legal editor Ari Ezra Waldman offered his thoughts on the SCOTUS situation earlier this week. Check them out HERE.
