What Obama always believed about the DOMA is not an issue to me. The question is: Why not wait until his second term?
One answer is that he doesn’t believe he will have a second term and wants to make the most of his time.
I doubt that.
I think a better answer is how “religious right” issues keep being used to obscure Tea Party concerns about the economy–the budget deficit, the national debt, and the coming financial depression which has not hit us yet. If someone opposes abortion or doesn’t believe in evolution, we are far more likely to see the media give time to those issues when the person in question is worried about and taking action about an entirely different issue.
As I see it right now, the most likely reason to change course on DOMA at this time is to distract from the fact that no one in power wants to face up to our economic situation.
When you think about it, It gives the GOP an out as well.
But I’m just guessing. What do you think?
My crazy worthless opinion is that O is piqued at the tea party insistence on citing constitutional authority for all laws. So O/Holder says, fine, we’ll predetermine that we don’t think DOMA passes constitutional muster all on our own (no rational basis we can advance).
This may be the same as just not wanting to appear hypocritical, or a subset of it.
The executive branch deciding it’s not going to defend the laws of the US seems like a dangerous precedent to me. It doesn’t matter what the President and DOJ think about a law. It’s their obligation to defend the laws of the US, until such time that SCOTUS determines them to be unconstitutional. So when the challenge to the DOMA finally gets to the Supreme Court, the DOJ just refuses to show up?
Oh the fun some future Republican President may have with this new power.
And I say this as someone who considers the DOMA to be an abomination.
I didn’t even considered whether or not this was unprecedented or mattered in that way… Well, I guess if Bush gave a boatload of new executive power for Obama to use, it is only fair for him to give back in return. Ugh.