The Eternal Three-Branch Campaign
By Mitch Berg
I don’t so much care about the repeal of DOMA itself; I thought it usurped laws that should be reserved to the states, and why shouldn’t gays pay into the divorce industry like everyone else anyway?
But Justice Scalia’s dissent on the DOMA decision was instructive:
“The Court is eager—hungry—to tell everyone its view of the legal question at the heart of this case. Standing in the way is an obstacle…”
The Court has “power to decide not abstract questions but real, concrete ‘Cases’ and ‘Controversies.’ Yet the plaintiff and the Government agree entirely on what should happen in this lawsuit. They agree that the court below got it right; and they agreed in the court below that the court below that one got it right as well.”
“What, then, are we doing here?”
Parts of the majority decision read like a Media Matters press release.
June 27th, 2013 at 1:29 pm
When one of a well-to-do married couple dies, the other spouse keeps all the family money free of federal death tax. If one of a well-to-do gay couple dies, the other pays federal death tax because they weren’t married.
Government routinely gives tax breaks to promote favored activity so the real question becomes: is there a sufficient reason for the federal government to promote marriage over shacking up? If the answer is NO, then what reason is there for any state government to do so? And if there is no reason for the states, either, then what’s the point of government regulating marriage at all?
June 27th, 2013 at 1:58 pm
As you know, I’m always on the look-out for ways to profit from Democrats’ idiocy. I’m snapping up warehouse space in Hudson already.
Gays have huge disposable income and are gullible. I’m considering a festival for gays to celebrate their marriages this August on Harriet Island, and have the city put up their gay rainbow flags on the Wabasha Bridge again.
I’m hoping to book Melissa Etheridge. I should get tons of free coverage from the local media. What do you think of “Sodomy on the Sippi” as the festival name? Whose naked backside should I put on the posters?
June 27th, 2013 at 2:41 pm
Keep in mind all the majority of the US Supreme Court had to do was say that there was no standing since it was a settled case. I guess Kennedy and the others didn’t care.
Walter Hanson
Minneapolis, MN
June 27th, 2013 at 6:40 pm
Anybody who reads the news regularly has some sense of who is in the SCOTUS, partly because they are there so long. Also, they own their votes in a way that caucus members in congress don’t. That allows an integrity that congress lacks. Even when, as Scalia this week, justices reverse themselves vociferously from one day to the next, there’s a predictable character. In Scalia’s case, he can be relied on to speak hatefully towards anyone who hates the Heritage Foundation, to plead judicial humility towards any law he supports and deplore the unconstitutionality of any law he disagrees with.