House Republicans today appointed a private attorney to argue on behalf of the Defense of Marriage Act, which the Obama administration essentially abandoned two months ago, and vowed to take funds from the Justice Department budget to pay for it.
In February the Obama administration announced it would no longer defend the 1996 act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. Attorney General Eric Holder said at the time that while the administration had previously defended DOMA in court, it had recently conducted a new examination and found the law was unconstitutional.
"DOMA cannot be constitutionally applied to same-sex couples whose marriages are legally recognized under state law," Holder wrote in a letter to John Boehner.
Facing a deadline in one of the 12 federal cases -- Windsor v. United States -- Boehner today named Paul D. Clement, the former solicitor general for George W. Bush, to officially take the lead in mounting a defense of the statute.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/john-boehner-house-republicans-reinvigorate-legal-defense-marriage/story?id=13402466
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