No, states can't ignore the Supreme Court on gay marriage

This is a little slippery to interpret—Cruz’s words are opaque, so that it’s unclear whether he’s actually arguing that officials should refuse to issue marriage licenses, or simply making an intellectual argument that they could. (Or perhaps it’s a dogwhistle!)

Is he right? “It’s ridiculous,” said David Vladeck, a professor of law at Georgetown. “The Supreme Court says the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to issue licenses .… That is the law of the land. We have something in the Constitution called the Supremacy Clause,” which states that the Constitution is the ultimate authority in the U.S.

One argument here is that the ruling only applies to the Sixth Circuit, as that’s where the case the justices decided originated. That might hold true if it was a statutory, rather than constitutional ruling, Vladeck said—but it wasn’t. “Ted Cruz ought to know that. I knew Ted Cruz before he became the new Ted Cruz, and he was an able lawyer,” Vladeck said. “My guess is this is just political posturing of the worst kind.”