Justice Alito, for his part, has made no secret of his hostility to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision on same-sex marriage. In 2020, when the court turned down an appeal from a county clerk who had been sued for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, he joined a statement written by Justice Clarence Thomas that called the decision at odds with the Constitution.

“In Obergefell v. Hodges,” the statement said, “the court read a right to same-sex marriage into the 14th Amendment, even though that right is found nowhere in the text.”…

There are limits to analyzing the reasoning of published Supreme Court opinions, to say nothing of drafts, said Michael C. Dorf, a law professor at Cornell. “Logic and syllogisms don’t carry us very far in the law,” he said.

If the draft or something like it is issued in the coming weeks, he said, “it portends big changes because it signals that the five most conservative justices are willing to court controversy on matters they care about.”