Marriage equality, the Supreme Court and the Chief Justice's cousin

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  Chief Justice John Roberts.AP

Today, the Supreme Court considered a case about whether voters in a state can pass a law that arguably violates the Constitution of the United States of America.  The case about to decide the fate of California’s Prop 8 is tangled up with the details of legal procedure and constitutional interpretation to the point where some analysts speculate the Court might dodge a ruling altogether on technical grounds. 

But the details sort of don’t matter --- what is really on trial this week is the future of equal treatment for gay Americans.  And the fact is, the tide is flowing forcefully in the direction of fairness and equality.  The Supreme Court will either ride the wave or try to block it or dodge it, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter.   The tide has irrevocably turned.

The fundamental equality of gay Americans is lapping against every shore of America from the Bible Belt to the Republican National Committee.  A leader in the Southern Baptist Convention recently reported that young people within the conservative church think opposing same-sex marriage “feels intolerant.”  The RNC “autopsy” report advised softening the party’s stance on gay rights issues and prominent Republicans including Sen. Rob Portman have announced their support for marriage equality.  Republicans are finally catching up with mainstream public opinion, which has been quickly evolving to now-majority support for gay marriage.  And among the observers inside the Court today was Jean Podrasky, the lesbian cousin of Chief Justice John Roberts.  The Chief Justice, a conservative, gave Podrasky one of his private tickets.   

It’s worth noting that even the lawyers defending Prop 8 aren’t arguing against the morality of gay marriage but merely trying to say the matter should be left to the states.  Anti-gay bias and bigotry is quickly falling out of fashion.

Of course, the Supreme Court should not be swayed by personal sentiment or popular opinion.  A founding principle of our nation is that fundamental rights should never be subject to popular vote --- whether the right to equal treatment under the 14^th Amendment or the right to own guns under the 2^nd Amendment.  The judiciary exists to hold politicians and the people accountable to a higher standard, to ensure that majority rule doesn’t trample on minority rights.  It is the job of the Supreme Court to hold federal, state and local governments accountable to our founding doctrines and the rule of law --- including the idea that government cannot pass a law discriminating against a group of people without a “legitimate purpose”.

More than 1,138 rights and benefits at the federal level accrue to couples based on marriage, from inheriting assets tax free to accessing spousal visas for immigration purposes.  Gay couples don’t want to change the marriages of straight couples in any way nor force religious institutions to perform weddings against their conscience.  This is simply about getting the same legal rights as other families.  In fact, the California’s Prop 8 isn’t really about marriage any more than anti-sodomy statutes were about sex.  The point of both was to enshrine second-class status for gay Americans.  And that is not a “legitimate purpose” for government discrimination. 

It is unclear from today’s hearings how the Court might rule on Prop 8.  It remains entirely possible that the Court might dodge the substantive question or rule on narrow grounds that only affect the State of California and not the rest of the country.  Whatever it does, the rights of hundreds of thousands of families like mine will be profoundly affected by whatever the Supreme Court rules on two marriage equality cases it is hearing this week.  Without question, what the Court rules will make a difference in the short-term legal and political realities faced by same-sex couples. 

But when Martin Luther King spoke about justice rolling “down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he evoked the long arc of history that ultimately bends toward equal treatment and fairness for all.   The Supreme Court may hurry the pace of justice or slow it down or dodge it altogether, but the sanctioning of anti-gay bias and legalized discrimination against gay families will someday soon be nothing more than an ugly relic of the past. 

When Chief Justice Roberts was being confirmed for the Court, his lesbian cousin, a liberal, enthusiastically backed his appointment.  Why?  “He is family,” she explained, articulating the shared values that we as a nation must continue to strive for as well.

Sally Kohn is a Fox News contributor and writer.  You can find her online at http://sallykohn.com or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sallykohn.

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Obama to nominate Walmart's Sylvia Matthews Burwell for budget chief

WASHINGTON –  President Barack Obama on Monday will nominate Walmart's Sylvia Mathews Burwell as his next budget director, a senior administration official said.

If confirmed by the Senate, Burwell would take the helm at the Office of Management and Budget at a time of heated budget battles between the White House and congressional Republicans. She would also bring more diversity to Obama's second-term Cabinet following criticism that many top jobs were going to white men.

The president will announce Burwell's nomination during a White House ceremony Monday morning, said the official, who requested anonymity in order to confirm the nomination ahead of Obama.

Burwell is a Washington veteran, having served as OMB's deputy director in the Clinton administration and chief of staff to former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Burwell currently runs the Walmart Foundation, the retail giant's philanthropic wing, and previously served as president of the Gates Foundation's Global Development Program.

The official credited Burwell with being a principal architect of a series of budget plans in the 1990s that led to a budget surplus.

Burwell's nomination signals that the White House is trying to get back to normal business after the president and Congress failed to avert $85 billion in automatic spending cuts that took effect Friday. While the president has warned of dire consequences for the economy as a result of the cuts, the White House does not want to the standoff with Congress to keep the president from focusing on other second-term priorities, including filling out his Cabinet and pursuing stricter gun laws and an overhaul of the nation's immigration system.

Obama made quick work of filling key national security openings in his administration, but has been slower to fill other Cabinet openings, including the OMB post. Vacancies also remain at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Commerce and Energy Departments, and the U.S. trade representative.

Burwell would replace acting OMB director Jeffrey Zients, a well-liked figure in the Obama administration, who has been discussed as a contender for other top jobs.

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Barack Obama, extortionist in chief

At the end of 1995 and stretching into January 1996, the federal government "shut down" because of an impasse between President Bill Clinton and House Republicans led by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The issue was increased taxes vs. less spending. Sound familiar? The government re-opened when a bipartisan agreement was reached to balance the budget by 2003. It wasn't for reasons that included, but were not limited to, two wars. Now the national debt is racing toward an unsustainable $17 trillion.

This time around it isn't about closing government. It's about "sequestration," which President Obama, the Democrats and their big media toadies are styling as economic Armageddon.

On Tuesday, following another vacation and a round of golf with the disgraced Tiger Woods, President Obama appeared in the Eisenhower Executive Office building next to the White House. Behind him on risers, looking like a church choir but without the robes, were his usual Greek chorus of potential victims should Republicans cut spending by a single dollar.

The president said the cuts from sequestration would be "brutal" if lawmakers allow "this meat cleaver approach to take place." Sounds like a bloody horror movie, doesn't it?

Military readiness would be hurt, he claimed, if these cuts were allowed to happen. Investments in energy curtailed, medical research impaired, teacher layoffs (I wasn't aware the federal government paid teacher salaries) and emergency responders couldn't respond.

Once again, the president offered up the old bait and switch: "targeted spending cuts" along with "closing tax loopholes." As has happened before, if Republicans agree to this (which they had better not if the party is to survive) they'll likely get inconsequential "cuts," if they get any at all, but tax hikes will occur right away. More importantly, any new revenue will likely not reduce the debt because Democrats in Congress are noted for spending new revenue and they won't deal with the major reason for the debt: entitlements.

Last Sunday's New York Times was a kind of preview of Obama's Tuesday remarks. An editorial running more than half the page offered a litany of gloom and doom if Republicans forced the administration to start behaving more responsibly with our money.

The president is again betting that playing to people's emotions, along with envy of "the rich" and calls for "fair share" in taxes will produce a win for him. But if it does, it won't be a win for the country. Can there be any doubt that the president's goal is to marginalize the Republican Party and make them ineffective now and in the next two elections?

The major media can be relied on -- with help from the administration -- to find people who will be laid off work, or a "homeless" person, or a crying woman with her baby down to the last drop of milk. They did during the government shutdown, obscuring the real issue, which is overspending.

As John Makin of the American Enterprise Institute wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, the sequester "...amounts to $2 of spending cuts for every dollar of the president's tax increases enacted on Jan. 2." The looming cuts, Makin notes, are "minuscule" when compared to the overall debt.

The president got his tax hike in the fiscal cliff debate. To ask for more now without significant spending cuts, entitlement reform and a re-written tax code aligns him with the extortionists who ruled Chicago during the Roaring '20s.

In his oath of office, the president promised to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Instead, he appears to be shredding it.

Whatever the short-term political price, Republicans must stand for the Constitution, the country and the future. Allowing the president to have his way again risks harming all three.

Cal Thomas is America's most widely syndicated newspaper columnist and a Fox News contributor. Follow him on Twitter@CalThomas. Readers may e-mail Cal Thomas at tmseditors@tribune.com.

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'Safe harbor'? Documents show ex-EPA chief Jackson used NJ email account

A Washington attorney suing the Obama administration for access to former EPA chief Lisa Jackson's alias emails revealed Wednesday that Jackson continued to use another email account -- this one registered with the New Jersey government -- while in the Obama administration. 

The New Jersey account turned up amid thousands of pages of emails released by the administration late last week. Much of the material in the document dump appears to be innocuous, and involves staffers sharing press clippings. 

But Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the use of alias and non-federal government accounts suggests a widespread attempt to skirt federal records laws and requests. 

"This is really epidemic among this administration. They're not that into transparency," Horner said Wednesday. 

Jackson, who left at the beginning of President Obama's second term, has already been under scrutiny for using the alias "Richard Windsor" in emails. The documents released last week showed that, in at least one case, Jackson also used her New Jersey government email account to forward her Richard Windsor account an article in July 2009. 

This would have been months after she left the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Horner said the account should have been closed by that point. He suggested it was used to protect certain messages from records requests. 

"It was no longer an account which anyone would think to have searched under any open records request because there was no defensible reason it should still be in operation," he told FoxNews.com in an email. "In other words, like the false-identity account, it was a presumed safe harbor. ... The question now is to determine just how, in fact, it was used." 

An EPA spokeswoman, asked about the latest complaint, referred FoxNews.com to an earlier statement explaining that EPA administrators for more than a decade have been assigned both "a public account and an internal account." 

"The email address for the public account is posted on EPA's website and is used by hundreds of thousands of Americans to send messages to the administrator. The internal account is an everyday, working email account of the administrator to communicate with staff and other government officials," the statement said. "Given the large volume of emails sent to the public account -- more than 1.5 million in fiscal year 2012, for instance -- the internal email account is necessary for effective management and communication between the administrator and agency colleagues." 

The statement explained that both accounts are reviewed when responding to records requests. 

The EPA did not specifically address whether either of those would have had anything to do with the New Jersey account. 

The latest development comes after the EPA confirmed that Region 8 Administrator James Martin plans to resign effective Friday. 

An EPA spokeswoman said he was resigning merely "for personal reasons." But Horner and Republican Sen. David Vitter claimed the resignation was tied to questions over the use of a personal email account to conduct "official business." 

Vitter and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., claimed documents showed he used his private me.com account to confirm a meeting with the general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund. 

The EPA, according to Politico.com, downplayed the communication as a one-time occurrence. 

But the Republican lawmakers wrote in a recent letter that "it does not appear that this transaction was an isolated incident."

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