ACSBlog

by Mary Bonauto and Paul Smith. Ms. Bonauto is the Civil Rights Project Director at Gay & Lesbian Defenders in Boston. She was lead counsel in the Goodridge Massachusetts marriage case in 2003. Mr. Smith practices law in Washington, D.C. and argued the landmark Lawrence v. Texas gay rights case in the Supreme Court in 2003.

We are co-counsel in two of the lawsuits challenging the Defense of Marriage Act that are now awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor. We principally chose “DOMA” as a litigation target because it so clearly denies gay and lesbian married couples the equal protection of the law guaranteed by the Constitution -- treating those married couples, and only those couples,  as though they are single for purposes of all 1,100-plus federal laws that take marital status into account. Significantly though, DOMA also involves a decision by Congress to second-guess the choices made by individual states that have married same-sex couples. By defining “marriage,” for all federal purposes, as limited to heterosexual unions, the law vitiates the States’ determination that married same-sex couples are married for federal purposes. The ability to say who is married has been the virtually exclusive domain of the states -- not Congress -- and is bounded only by other constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection.

We have always felt that this limited federalism aspect of the DOMA litigation is also helpful on the equal protection challenge. In our briefs (as in Edie Windsor’s in the Supreme Court), the fact that states control marriage policy in this country is used to undercut the claimed justifications for discriminating based on sexual orientation that have been offered up by the law’s defenders.  Although neither we nor Windsor raised these claims, one state, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, has its own pending case in which it argues that DOMA undermines state prerogatives to license marriages for same-sex couples as it does for others. A prominent amicus brief by conservative legal scholars filed in the Windsor case also sounded concerns that DOMA goes beyond defining marriage for federal purposes and interferes with state law. And at the Supreme Court arguments on March 27, Justice Kennedy and others asked questions suggesting they might agree that DOMA violates principles of federalism.

But the prospect that the Court might give considerable weight to federalism in a decision invalidating DOMA has caused grave concerns among some progressive observers – most notably Linda Greenhouse in her recent column ominously named “Trojan Horse.” The primary concern she expressed was that a decision invalidating DOMA on federalism grounds would, by emphasizing the primacy of states in setting marriage policy, somehow immunize from constitutional challenge those states that have chosen not to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples. But this concern reflects a mixing of constitutional apples and oranges.

by Jeremy Leaming

Despite the lofty rhetoric to the contrary, the Obama administration has failed to help the scores of Americans thrown out of their homes because of rampant foreclosure fraud. The administration instead chose to try to put a sheen of due diligence on a federal effort to get to the bottom of what David Dayen for Salon calls “the largest consumer fraud in the history of the United States.”

With the nation’s economy still hobbled by high unemployment and a growing gap between the superwealthy and everyone else, the U.S. Treasury Department recently revealed a pathetic settlement with some of the shady bankers behind the criminal foreclosure schemes that fails to provide little if any help to the millions of victims of the tawdry financial machinations. Part of the problem, as Dayen reports, centers on the fact that the federal government allowed consultants hired by banks to conduct so-called independent reviews of millions of foreclosures. The consultants, Dayen continues, made millions and only completed a tiny portion of “independent reviews” requested by scores of aggrieved homeowners. When the Treasury settled with the bankers it announced the “vast majority" of borrowers  – 3.4 million -- will receive paltry sums, like $300 or less.

But the Treasury Department’s Office of Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) likely didn’t expect U.S. Senators to dig much into the obviously overblown and flawed review of the millions of foreclosure victims. And they likely were not expecting Elizabeth Warren, one of the nation’s most recognizable and passionate spokespersons on behalf of the middle class, to be holding a U.S. Senate seat and a committee position to zero in on their woefully or intentionally inept handling of the foreclosure crisis. 

But last week, Sen. Warren (D-Mass.), former Harvard Law School Professor, longtime consumer rights advocate and driving force behind the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did just that. And it was not the first time the senator has used her platform to highlight the federal government’s bungling of the foreclosure crisis. Last week, as TPM’s Sahil Kapur reported Warren has in just a few months in the Senate “seized opportunities to highlight questionable banking practices an ostensibly lax regulatory response, a chamber frequently criticized for its coziness with Wall Street.”

During a subcommittee hearing Warren, who as Dayen notes has “a grass-roots army of enthusiastic supporters” and “makes headlines crossing the street,” blasted the OCC regulators for “withholding information they said they possessed about improper foreclosures or other abusive financial practices from victims of those practices seeking recourse in court,” Kapur reported.

The regulators told Warren they had not made a decision about what information they will make public about criminal foreclosures.

“So you have made a decision to protect the banks but not a decision to tell the families who were illegally foreclosed against?” Warren asked the regulators.