Andrew Cohen at the Atlantic:
Congress has no constitutional authority to punish people who don’t want to have health insurance, Paul Clement argued last week before the United States Supreme Court. This week? The heralded attorney is arguing, to another panel of federal judges, that Congress has plenty of constitutional authority to punish people who don’t want to marry someone of the opposite sex. Last week, Clement defended states’ rights and labeled as “unprecedented” the federal health care policy. This week, he says that Congress can dictate terms of a federal marriage policy over the objections of states which have legalized same-sex marriage.
Welcome to the forlorn world of the Defense of Marriage Act, the teetering federal law which defines marriage as solely that between a man and a woman and thus deprives same-sex married couples of certain federal rights and privileges.
