The beauty of our intricately constructed government is not only the elaborate checks and balances within each level (federal, state) of government...but the fact that there ARE distinct levels...each with specific powers.
Fundamental rights should be protected at ALL levels of government...from the local up to the federal....but the Constitution is ultimately the only real law we have...since state laws cannot usurp the Constitution....and the rights enumerated therein.
This is why we are so upset here...even if Utah can regulate around this ruling...a fundamental bulwark in the onslaught agaisnt government encroachment of individual freedoms has been eliminated.
Pity folks who live in corrupt blue states..this ruling makes them second class Americans.
The issue is how much leeway should the states and the citizens in those states have in setting their own course without interference by the federal government? There has been constant tension on this point throughout our history. It is a very complicated issue.
In the aftermath of the Civil War and the ratification of the 14th Amendment the law settled increasingly on reining in the states and restricting the powers of state and local government vis a vis the federal government. Ostensibly this was to ensure that all citizens would enjoy the same fundamental rights irrespective of the state that each citizen lived in. It became much more than that as a result of FDR's New Deal and continuing through LBJ's Great Society programs to the present.
If anything, liberal supreme court justices have demonstrated a bias in favor of protecting and advancing social liberalism to the extent of inventing rights whole cloth as in the Roe v. Wade (the right to an abortion as an adjunct to the right of privacy enunciated in Griswold v. Connecticut). On the other hand, they have shown a bias against protecting personal property rights, a bias that dates back more than 70 years.
Today's court would apparently uphold an inner city woman's right to have a third-term abortion while simultaneously upholding the city's right to condemn her home so that a private abortion clinic could be built there.