Chief Justice Roberts, in is dissent re: Obergefell v. Hodges:
Stripped of its shiny rhetorical gloss, the majority’s argument is that the Due Process Clause gives same-sex couples a fundamental right to marry because it will be good for them and for society. ... The majority’s driving themes are that marriage is desirable and petitioners desire it.
And, most important, the court's majority desires it. Since when did Supreme Court of the United States become a superlegislature?
But Roberts has little room to complain: Stripped of its prodigies of hidden-wire gymnastics, his majority opinion in King v. Burwell, this past week's Obamacare case, basically came down to the observation that a straightforward reading of the law would lead to unintended consequences – indeed, consequences quite contrary to Congress's intent. ‘Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them.’ True enough, but there is no other plausible interpretation of the text than that the subsidies were intended only for users of the state-created exchange, Roberts's ‘jiggery-pokery’ notwithstanding (indeed, the law is explicit about the meaning of ‘State’, to wit: ‘each of the 50 States and the District of Columbia’), so the Supreme Court could only properly bounce the ball back to Congress and maybe call them dumbasses. His further insistence that Congress didn't clearly mean to penalize the citizens of states that didn't create their own ‘exchanges’ is belied by his own previous ruling in NFIB v. Sibelius that it was unconstitutional for Congress to penalize states who refused to cooperate with the ACA's (Obamacare's) Medicaid-expansion provisions. Congress's punitive intent was certainly clear then, but now, in the same law, where the language is equally clear, and in the face of bald confessions by one of the chief architects of the bill, we are unsure whether Congress really meant it?