Does the Supreme Court have any authority to rule on the merits of a motion in which the proponents of Proposition 8 have standing?

that Proposition 8 violated the federal Constitution. (Hollingsworth v. Perry, supra, 133 S.Ct. at pp. 2662-2668.) As Lucas points out, the high court declared early in its opinion that "[b]ecause we find that petitioners do not have standing, we have no authority to decide this case on the merits . . . ." (Id. at p. 2659, italics added.) To be sure, Perry did not reach the merits of the proponents' claim that Proposition 8 was constitutional. But Perry is inapposite because, unlike the present case, it did not involve the application of res judicata or claim preclusion to a second action between the same parties based on the same primary right under California law.