Cruz: Rulings among the ‘darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history’

Supreme Court decisions affirming ObamaCare and granting a national right to same sex marriage have brought “some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history,” Sen. Ted Cruz said Friday.
 
“Today is some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history,” he said on The Sean Hannity Show, the Fox pundit’s radio program, on Friday.

“Yesterday and today were both naked and shameless judicial activism.”
 
While many other Republican presidential hopefuls sent out statements deriding the Friday decision, Cruz’s campaign did not.

He took to the Senate floor to slam the Affordable Care Act ruling on Thursday, panning it as “disgraceful.”
 
“Six justices joined the Obama administration, you now have Barack Obama, Kathleen Sebelius, and six justices responsible for forcing failed disaster of a law on millions of Americans, and simply rewriting the law in a way that is fundamentally contrary to their judicial oath,” he told Hannity Friday.
 
He then shifted to Friday’s decision.
 
“Today, this radical decision purporting to down the marriage laws of every state. It has no connection to the United States Constitution,” he said.
 
“They are simply making it up. It is lawless, and in doing so, they have undermined the fundamental legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court.”
 
Cruz has warned against this decision for months and filed text for a constitutional amendment in April that defines marriage as heterosexual.
 
In a narrow victory for advocates of same-sex marriage, Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with the four liberal-leaning justices on Friday to make those marriages legal across the country. He framed marriage as a fundamental right and argued that it would be a violation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause to bar same-sex couples from marrying.
 
But all four conservative justices penned dissents criticizing that ruling. Chief Justice John Roberts warned that the decision has “nothing to do” with the constitution. Fresh off of his scathing dissent in Thursday’s 6-3 decision to back the administration’s expansion of health care subsidies to those in states that hadn’t set up localized exchanges, Justice Antonin Scalia also penned his own dissent.
 
“I write separately to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy,” he wrote.
 
“Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.”