House Republicans today announced that the (not very) Bi-Partisan Legal Advisory Group will stop defending DOMA: the Federal Defense of Marriage Act. http://www.advocate.com/politics/2013/07/18/house-republicans-drop-doma-defense This follows in the recent wake of the Supreme Court finding section 3 of the act unconstitutional. Section 3 denied federal benefits such as joint tax filing, immigration and approximately 1000 others to same-sex couples legally married in their respective states. I imagine the next step will be a challenge to section 2 of the act requiring states to recognize same-sex marriages, for legal purposes, from other states where they are legal even if such marriages are not permitted in those states. The same thing already happens with respect to first-cousin marriages and marriages from states where there is a year or two's difference in the age of consent: two sixteen year olds can marry in Nevada and their marriage will be recognized in California even though that State's age of consent is eighteen. With no-one left with the standing to defend DOMA and the various, state, mini-DOMAs, I wonder how much longer these statutes can expect to stay on the books?
Republicans have such high-minded principles that they demand of OTHER people, and demands for our president to follow, but for themselves, they just roll over and fold up when it is going to take work to follow their OWN advice.
It was lawless for the President to refuse to defend in court an act of Congress, signed by a President. The House of Representatives should not have to do this.
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that public officials in other states will follow suit and refuse to defend their state bans. As for "how much longer", the answer is "too long". I would say at least 10 to 15 years before we see a majority of states having repealed their bans, absent some intervention by the Supreme Court.
You could well be right but I think an overthrow of section 2 could bring a lot of, more immediate, relief to a lot of people.
The time factor is partially a matter of finding plaintiffs who are both willing to see a long trial through, with all the media attention, and once you find willing plaintiffs, having it be 'the right case'. The other part of the time factor is that it's expensive and a lot of work to mount a campaign to repeal an amendment, and our opposition tends to be better established and have deeper pockets.
No it isn't. That's his prerogative. Every President can decide in their own opinion what is constitutional, and what isn't. They always have been able to. They can't ignore the law while it's in effect, but once the courts have ruled they don't HAVE to keep challenging it just because it was passed by congress at some point. That's the way it has always been. The fact that BPLA decided not to fight it indicates to me at least that he was probably correct to not waste any more time on it, and the fact that the Republican Party is abandoning it says to me they can't even find grounds to challenge the ruling if they wanted to.
I agree but what fascinates me more about this is the extent to which this whole exercise of a "defense" has been a, purely, political calculation. These guys operate in D.C., half of their staffers are probably a little "light on their feet". The actual defense arguments put forward were pretty woeful even if they did cost nearly three million dollars and I think that the BLAG (and probably even their retained attorneys) knew this. That said as long as they thought the exercise would buy them more voter support than they would lose, they probably thought it was worthwhile to keep going. Have they reached the point where they think that continued involvement will actually cost them viable political capital, voter support and general goodwill? Well, somebody somewhere must be crunching the numbers because although 3 million sounds like a lot to most people, some of these guys have probably lost that much in change behind the sofa.
I believe so. Or as you say they would likely keep fighting it just to keep the base happy. The signs point to their internal numbers are likely telling them the public is losing interest on gay marriage as an issue or that the public has turned against them on it. Same for immigration truth be told.
Marriage isn't a federal issue so DOMA was a mistake. I still find it ironic that Clinton gets a virtual free-pass from the left for having signed it into law.
I don't care. But I was surprised when it happened because I assumed the Brits had already done it years ago. To hear gays tell it the US was far behind the rest of the world on that subject when in fact we turned out to be the leading edge of confusion on the topic. This is sort of like the reaction libs have to limiting abortion to 20 weeks. They always hold up the Euro's as the perfect example of lib enlightenment when it turns out that abortions in most Euro territories are not legal after only 12 weeks. Who would'a thunk it?
Marriage is not entirely a state issue. It's a federal issue when one state if forced to recognize a gay marriage from another state. Or when the federal government legalizes gay marriage in the military, for instance.
I have a lot of family on both sides of the Atlantic plus I know people who have been personally affected by DOMA.
There were lots of protests and negative press from the Left on that issue. But the Right ignored them, because that interferes with their "monolithic Left and MSM" rhetoric.
It's late March 1945 for the Homophobes, hunkered down in their bunker under the Reichschancellory. With their leaders dreaming up non-existant armies to fight the "Gay Allies".
