In response to Justice Clarence Thomas – and Insurrectionist Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) – wanting to reverse the landmark decision of Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015) establishing an equal protection liberty to same-sex marriage, the House today voted to safeguard same-sex marriage by federal statutory law.
The Hill reports, House passes bill protecting marriage equality, with 47 GOP members voting ‘yes’:
The House passed a bill on Tuesday to protect marriage equality, a direct response to an opinion from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas last month that called for reversing multiple decisions that enshrined LGBTQ rights.
The legislation, titled the Respect for Marriage Act, passed in a 267-157 vote, with 47 Republicans joining all Democrats in supporting the measure. Seven Republicans did not vote.
Arizona Congressional Delegation Vote: “Yeah”: Gallego, Grijalva, Kirkpatrick, O’Halleran, Stanton; “Nay”: Biggs, Gosar, Lesko, Schweikert.
The measure, which faces a shaky future in the 50-50 Senate, calls for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a bill former President Clinton signed into law in 1996 that recognized marriage as “only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.” The measure referred to the word spouse as “a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.”
DOMA had passed through both chambers of Congress with bipartisan support.
If passed by the Senate and signed into law, the Respect for Marriage Act would also require that individuals be considered married if they were wed in a state where marriage was legal. The provision, according to the House Judiciary Committee, ensures that same-sex and interracial couples are treated equally to other married individuals at the federal level.
Additionally, the bill gives the attorney general authority to launch civil action against any individual who violates it and allows any individual to take civil action if their rights as laid out in the bill are breached.
House passage of the bill comes less than one month after the Supreme Court issued a ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that protected access to abortion as a constitutional right.
Thomas penned a concurring opinion to the decision that called on the court to reconsider all substantive due process precedents established by the bench, including Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case that barred states from outlawing consensual gay sex, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling that made same-sex marriage a constitutional right.
Note: Justice Thomas failed to mention Loving v. Virginia, barring states from prohibiting interracial marriages, also a substantive due process precedent, because he personally benefits from this decision.
House Democrats introduced the Respect for Marriage Act and brought it to the floor for a vote as a preemptive step to protect LGBTQ rights in case the court moves to chip away at the two cases in the future.
PBS adds, House approves same-sex marriage bill in response to Roe v. Wade decision:
Tuesday’s election-year roll call was partly political strategy, forcing all House members, Republicans and Democrats, to go on the record with their views.
Wary of political fallout, GOP leaders did not [whip] direct their lawmakers to hold the party line against the bill, aides said. Dozens of Republicans joined Democrats in voting for passage.
While the Respect for Marriage Act is expected to pass the House, with a Democratic majority, it is almost certain to stall in the evenly split Senate, where most Republicans would likely join a filibuster to block it. It’s one of several bills, including those enshrining abortion access, that Democrats are proposing to confront the court’s conservative majority. Another bill, guaranteeing access to contraceptive services, is set for a vote later this week.
Polling shows a majority of Americans favor preserving rights to marry whom one wishes, regardless of the person’s sex, gender, race or ethnicity, a long-building shift in modern mores toward inclusion.
A Gallup poll in June showed broad and increasing support for same-sex marriage, with 70% of U.S. adults saying they think such unions should be recognized by law as valid. The poll showed majority support among both Democrats (83%) and Republicans (55%).
Approval of interracial marriage in the U.S. hit a six-decade high at 94% in September, according to Gallup.
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., in a floor speech setting Tuesday’s process in motion, said “It’s time for our colleagues across the aisle to stand up and be counted. Will they vote to protect these fundamental freedoms? Or will they vote to let states take those freedoms away?”
But Republicans insisted Tuesday that the court was only focused on abortion access in June when it struck down the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade ruling, and they argued that same-sex marriage and other rights were not threatened.
The Clarence Thomas concurrence suggests otherwise.
In fact, of all the Republicans who rose to speak during the morning debate, almost none directly broached the subject of same-sex or interracial marriage.
“We are here for a political charade, we are here for political messaging,” said Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee.
Well no shit, Sherlock. This is what Mitch McConnell does all of the time with “vote-a-rama” in the Senate. Republicans have lived off of political messaging votes for decades. They never actually pass any legislation (except tax cuts for their corporate overlords).
Even as it passed the House with Republican votes, the outcome in the Senate is uncertain.
[In] a notable silence, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell declined to express his view on the bill, leaving an open question over how strongly his party would fight it, if it even comes up for a vote in the upper chamber.
“I don’t see anything behind this right now other than, you know, election year politics,” said the GOP whip, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota.
Note: Republicans know that they don’t have to do anything. They have six activist radical Republican Justices that they packed onto the Supreme Court (stealing two seats), and those six unelected and unaccountable justices will do their dirty work for them. This reactionary Court will reverse Obergefell v. Hodges, and will strike down the Respect for Marriage Act if it ever becomes law, because six unelected and unaccountable justices are now a Republican super-legislature. Or America’s new Star Chamber – I’m using it as a pejorative to describe a secretive judicial body that is grossly unfair and that is used to reverse fundamental civil liberties.
If Congress really wants to stop this reactionary Court, it has the constitutional authority to strip the court of jurisdiction over any fundamental civil liberties that Congress does not want unelected and unaccountable justices toying with.
Law Professor Christopher Sprigman explained this in Stripping the Courts’ Jurisdiction (excerpt):
[T]he deepest threat that judicial review poses for democracy lies ahead of us. Republicans have built their recent political strategy around stocking the federal bench with right-wing partisans. And they’ve done so for a reason: Demographic change is making it increasingly difficult for the GOP to win elections, but a conservative judiciary can stand in the way of much of what Democrats and a majority of Americans hope to accomplish. The conservative Supreme Court would likely intervene, for example, to limit attempts to address global warming, to expand health care, to enforce rational public-health laws, or to tax the very wealthy. In all these cases, the Supreme Court would not be enforcing any clear text in the Constitution. It would be exercising raw power.
For any committed small-d democrat, this sort of politicized judging is unacceptable. And opposition is starting to build: We’ve seen a slew of recent court reform proposals, including judicial term limits, Supreme Court supermajority voting requirements, and, perhaps most prominently, court-packing.
In the end, though, none of these get to the heart of the problem, which isn’t that judges are too liberal or too conservative. It’s that judges are simply too powerful.
We need a deeper reform, one that the Constitution specifically authorizes. Article III of the Constitution gives Congress the power to strip federal courts’ jurisdiction: a power that can be employed to rein in politicized courts and even to override judges when they stand in the way of change that a substantial and enduring political majority wants.
How would jurisdiction-stripping work? Article III, Section 1 gives Congress complete discretion on whether to create the lower federal courts, a power that Congress has used from the founding to limit lower courts’ jurisdiction. And Article III, Section 2, Clause 2 explicitly empowers Congress to make “exceptions” to the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction—that is, to pick and choose within approximately 99 percent of the Supreme Court’s total docket what cases the Court has the power to hear.
If Democrats really want to get serious about constraining an activist radical Republican Supreme Court instead of holding messaging votes, this is the bill that they would be trying to pass. But they are not doing so, of course, because of the archaic Senate filibuster rule and two Vichy Democrat Senators who are collaborators with the Sedition Party enemies of Democracy.
Everything comes down to a larger Democratic majority in a dysfunctional Senate, Democratic senators who are committed to repealing the archaic Senate filibuster rule and actually getting shit done that the American people want done. Like a Democratic House routinely gets done.
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Paul Waldman writes, “Are Republicans coming for marriage equality next? Yes they are.”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/18/republicans-coming-for-marriage-equality-obergefell/
Having dispatched Roe v. Wade, Republicans may soon be coming for marriage equality. Many Republicans say that’s not true: Their line of the moment is that while the Supreme Court decision that established marriage equality was a terrible miscarriage of justice, they have too much else to worry about at the moment to push for it to be overturned.
Should you believe them? Probably not. After all, right now this is not a party that is unwilling to revisit its past defeats to see if they can be reversed. And the best way for Democrats to stop it from happening is to make it an issue, and use against every Republican.
In his decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. [lied] referred to the “unfounded fear” that after declaring there is no constitutional right to abortion, the court might next overturn other decisions, including Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that established marriage equality. Not to worry, Alito said; this decision was about abortion and nothing else.
But other conservatives were not so coy. In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas cited Obergefell as one of a series of “demonstrably erroneous” cases that must be overturned. And on a recent podcast, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), a past and future presidential candidate, said that “Obergefell, like Roe v. Wade, ignored two centuries of our nation’s history,” and that it was “clearly wrong when it was decided.”
Cruz went on to say, “I don’t think this court has any appetite” to overturn Obergefell and other decisions such as Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down state laws outlawing contraception. That’s possible. But one of the only ways Democrats can keep it from happening is to demonstrate to the court’s Republican majority that it would be a political disaster for their party if they did so.
Forget about Republicans saying, “Don’t be silly, we don’t want to make same-sex marriage illegal.” When they say that, what they really mean is, “Let’s talk about something else.”
This is what we used to call a “wedge issue,” one that drives a wedge between one part of your opponent’s party and another. And if Democrats want to figure out how to do it, they should look at how public opinion on marriage equality was transformed in the first place.
[It’s] hard to imagine what would be more anti-family than nullifying existing marriages and barring committed couples from marrying in the future. Do Republicans really want to break up stable families? What will happen to the kids? Don’t we need more secure families?
If they say “We don’t want to go that far,” one might remind them that the Texas Republican Party just approved a platform saying:
Lest there be any confusion, they added that Obergefell “has no basis in the Constitution and should be nullified.”
That may not be the position of most Republicans — at least for now. Up until a year ago, this appeared to be an issue on which the party had essentially surrendered. Most Republicans hadn’t changed their opposition to marriage equality, but they had accepted that they lost the argument and didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
But the overturning of Roe has energized Republicans, convincing them that they can ride this backlash farther than they thought. Just about everything is up for grabs. And even if most of them don’t want to outlaw same-sex marriage, the conservative base does — and they drive the party’s agenda.
Which is why Democrats should force Republicans to answer whether they want to break up families and make it illegal for millions of Americans to get married. Let’s see if they’ll stand up to their base and say unequivocally not just that this isn’t something they’re interested in pursuing, but that every American should be able to marry the person they love and marriage equality should remain the law of the land.
If they won’t say that, you’ll have a pretty good idea of their real intentions.
Paul Waldman continues, “Democrats need a strategy that hits voters in the gut”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/19/democrats-abortion-contraception-marriage-clueless-electorate/
Faced with demands to do something about the right-wing revolution the Supreme Court is inflicting on the country, congressional Democrats will hold votes on bills guaranteeing marriage equality and the right to contraception. These are protected at the moment, but many fear the court and Republicans will move to attack them sometime in the near future.
Since these bills will fall to Republican filibusters in the Senate, they are demonstration votes, meant not to become law (at least not yet), but in large part to force Republicans to vote against them and thereby reveal themselves to be out of step with public opinion. As many a Democrat has said, “Let’s get them on the record.”
But “getting them on the record” doesn’t accomplish much if you don’t have a strategy to turn that unpopular vote into a weapon that can be used to actually punish those Republicans. And there’s little evidence Democrats have such a strategy.
Sure, they’ll issue some news releases and talk about it on cable news. And here or there the vote might find its way into a campaign mailer … But I fear that too many Democrats think getting them on the record is enough by itself.
The reason is that unlike their Republican counterparts, Democrats tend to have far too much faith in the American voter.
[If] you’re reading this, politics is probably a daily reality for you. You almost certainly have a deep well of both foundational knowledge and day-to-day awareness of the political world. You know who the major players are and what their jobs entail. You can explain what a “filibuster” is, or how a bill becomes a law. And because you follow the news, you know what the issues of the moment are and where the two parties stand on them.
Here’s the problem: Most Americans have only a fraction of the understanding you do about these things — not because they’re dumb or ignorant but mainly because they just don’t care. They worry about other things, especially their jobs and their families. When they have free time they’d rather watch a ballgame or gossip with a friend than read about whether certain provisions of Build Back Better might survive in some process called “reconciliation.”
If you are the kind of weirdo who cares about politics, you may find it difficult to communicate effectively to those regular people about something they neither know nor care much about.
[I’ve] spent plenty of time trying to understand how normal people think about politics, but that understanding is always incomplete. And most Democrats I know are still captive to the hope that politics can be rational and deliberative, ultimately producing reasonable outcomes.
Republicans have no such illusions. They usually start from the assumption that voters don’t pay attention and should be reached by the simplest, most emotionally laden appeals they can devise. So Republicans don’t bother with 10-point policy plans; they just hit voters with, “Democrats want illegals to take your job, kill your wife, and pervert your kids,” and watch the votes pour in.
Of course, sometimes those appeals fall flat, and Democrats win plenty of elections. And every once in a while, a vote in Congress gets so much attention and discussion that even regular people hear about it and might even form an opinion.
But like most such demonstration votes, the ones on contraception and marriage equality probably won’t be one of those times. Turning them into something that moves the electorate will require a lot of planning and work to execute. It will mean concerted and coordinated effort. If Democrats think “getting them on the record” will get the job done all by itself, they’re going to be disappointed once again.
What AZBlueMeanie said x 1000.
Most people don’t even know what government does or who their reps are or why they should care.
Republicans will lie and cheat and steal to win, Dems won’t even admit that the ACA has been a massive success.
Their biggest accomplishment in decades.
Voters don’t know or care that you want to work with the other side, and every time a Dem says they want to reach across the aisle, Mitch McConnell has le petite mort and his face tries to make a smile.
Dems need to stop worrying about losing battles (aka getting reelected) and start fighting to win the war.
You know how you can tell Republicans fear progressive ideas?
Look at how much time they spend trashing AOC.
Republicans are more scared of AOC than the Uvalde Texas cops are of doing their jobs.