My thanks to Liberation News for posting my thoughts immediately after yesterday’s arguments in the marriage equality cases: Struggle for Equality at the Supreme Court.
Please see that link for my analysis of the content of the arguments. For the Court-watcher readers of this blog, I’ll add a few more random thoughts about the argument-day-as-event:
Inside the courtroom, someone disrupted the arguments, yelling after Mary Bonauto finished her opening argument. Something about Hell; fairly incoherent, and I don’t think just because he was hard to hear. I had seen one disruption before, some years ago, and the Supreme Court Police carried them out with remarkable efficiency. But this time, the person could be heard yelling for several minutes. Scalia remarked, “rather refreshing, actually.” Jeffrey Toobin had more to say about this episode.
To end on a positive note, Verrilli was great! The Administration is still constraining him to argue only the equal protection theory, not the fundamental rights theory (which is my bet for what gets Kennedy’s vote), but I think that’s a good thing (not that they’re going to decide based on heightened scrutiny, but it’s at least taking a shot at pushing them there).