Says states not directly involved in the gay marriage lawsuits that reached the Supreme Court “are not bound” by the court’s ruling.
— Ted Cruz on Sunday, June 28th, 2015 in an interview with NPR News
The U.S. Supreme Court holds ultimate sway on the laws of the land, yes?
Hold on, Ted Cruz said in an interview about the court’s 5-4 decision holding that state bans on gay marriage violate federal principles of equal protection and fair treatment under the law.
After the June 26, 2015, ruling, which addressed challenges to state laws in Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan and Kentucky, Cruz said that if a party isn’t directly involved in a dispute before the Supreme Court, it’s not required to comply with the ruling.
“Those who are not parties to the suit are not bound by it,” Cruz said.
A reader asked us to check Cruz’s claim.
The Republican senator and presidential aspirant should know about the high court. He argued before the court on Texas’ behalf in a past job as the state’s solicitor general.
In the interview, Cruz told Steve Inskeep, who hosts NPR’s Morning Edition program, that the court’s ruling imposed “elitist radical views,” short-circuiting the ability of each state to define marriage.
Inskeep asked if Cruz would encourage officials who disagree with the ruling to ignore or defy it. State officials “cannot ignore a direct judicial order,” Cruz said. “The parties to a case cannot ignore a direct judicial order. But it does not mean that those who are not parties to case are bound by a judicial order.”
We alerted Cruz’s campaign to this fact check and didn’t hear back.
Legal experts
Separately, several legal experts told us the idea that states not party to the marriage cases weren’t bound by the court’s ruling may have technical merit, but that’s all.
Richard Fallon, a Harvard specialist in constitutional law, said by email that under the doctrine of precedent, “any official who failed to issue gay marriage licenses would be sueable for failure to do so, and any court in which the suit was filed would be obliged to follow the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling. In the long run, non-compliance thus amounts at most to a delaying tactic.”
In contrast, Lynn Wardle, a law professor at Brigham Young University who has advocated that the Constitution leaves it to legislators to stipulate who may marry, called Cruz’s statement “precisely correct.” Entities not party to a suit are not bound by the resulting judicial order, Wardle said by email, adding: “That’s the way our litigation system works.”
Only parties before the court are bound by its judgment and orders, Randy Barnett, a professor of legal theory at the Georgetown University Law Center, said by email, but all other courts are bound to follow the court (which Cruz hinted at). So, Barnett wrote, “it is futile for states who are not parties to resist. More importantly, when a ruling is clear, ignoring the Supreme Court’s decisions until a court directly orders them to obey undermines the rule of law.”
If nonparties to the suits don’t go along with the ruling, he said, “they are postponing the inevitable and flouting the rule of law that was announced by the Court.”
Stephen Vladeck, an American University law professor, called Cruz’s statement “literally true, but deeply misleading. Technically, the only parties that are bound by a ruling by the Supreme Court are the parties to that litigation — and so, in the context of the marriage cases, the small subset of states whose bans on gay marriage were before the Court.
“But the way our system works,” Vladeck emailed, “every state and federal court is ultimately subject to the supervision of the Supreme Court at least where federal law is concerned. That’s why those courts generally apply the Constitution as it has been interpreted by the Justices in Washington; if they don’t, they’re likely to be reversed.” Asked if Wardle had a point saying Cruz was precisely correct, Vladeck said that read is misleading in that states still have to go along with such a ruling, absent a good-faith reason not to.
By phone, Susan Sommer, the lead lawyer for Lambda Legal in the suits that reached the Supreme Court, suggested that “only in the very most technical and hair-splitting way could it be said that the Supreme Court’s ruling is not immediately and directly binding on every state government and government official in the country.” Sommer said she knows of no legitimate school of thought that could say the ruling doesn’t apply to all the states. “It’s sort-of Law School 101,” Sommer said.
We also heard back from SCOTUS Blog reporter Lyle Denniston, who’s covered the Supreme Court for more than 50 years.
The Constitution’s Article III, Denniston said by email, limits the authority of federal courts to actual cases or controversies, so the outcome is between the actual litigants, as Cruz said.
Then again, he said, “the Supreme Court since 1803 (Marbury v. Madison) has claimed the authority to ‘say what the law is’ constitutionally, and its conclusions on what the Constitution means in a given case are made binding across the land, as a result of the reinforcement of its authority by the Supremacy Clause of Article VI” of the Constitution.
Our ruling
Cruz said states not directly involved in the gay marriage lawsuits that reached the Supreme Court “are not bound” by the court’s ruling.
He has a thread of a point in that only four states were directly involved in the case. But that’s an incomplete answer to the question of whether states could ignore the court’s ruling. Other courts would be bound by the Supreme Court’s precedent, making the ruling applicable throughout the nation. That’s a fact that Cruz alluded to only after being pressed by the interviewer for clarification of his earlier misleading statement.
We rate the claim Mostly False.
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