Obama Plays Politics with our Laws

"In 1996 Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) by huge bipartisan votes -- 342 to 67 in the House and 85 to 14 in the Senate. President Bill Clinton signed the measure into law.  Now, the Obama administration says DOMA, which permits states to refuse to recognize gay marriages from other states and also creates a federal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, is unconstitutional.

... 'I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,' Obama said Monday about the arguments over Obamacare before the nation's highest court. The danger presented in the health care case, the president continued, is that 'an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.'

... If the president was so concerned about a court overturning a duly constituted law passed by a democratically elected Congress, why was he urging a small group of unelected judges to strike down DOMA, a measure that won passage by a far greater margin than Obamacare? The answer is, of course, that the administration is making a political argument for its positions, not a legal one.

... [T]he timing of the arguments over Obamacare and DOMA has revealed the flexibility of the administration's arguments over constitutionality. And the flap over Obama's remarks is just a preview of what is coming when the court issues its decision on Obamacare this June."

--columnist Byron York