Supreme Court

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A question for the Chief Justice

So, Mr. Chief Justice, where did you say you went to law school?  That’s what I want to ask Mr. Roberts after yesterday’s hearing on The Defense of Marriage Act or DOMA.

Here is the relevant exchange as reported by the New York Times.

He expressed irritation that the case was before the court, saying President Obama’s approach — to enforce the law but not defend it — was a contradiction.

“I don’t see why he doesn’t have the courage of his convictions,” the chief justice said. He said Mr. Obama should have stopped enforcing a statute he viewed as unconstitutional “rather than saying, ‘Oh, we’ll wait till the Supreme Court tells us we have no choice.’ ”

The White House took umbrage at the remark and said the president was upholding his constitutional duty to execute the laws until the Supreme Court rules otherwise. “There is a responsibility that the administration has to enforce laws that are on the books,” said Josh Earnest, a deputy White House press secretary. “And we’ll do that even for laws that we disagree with, including the Defense of Marriage Act.”

The Chief Justice should know that the President has to enforce laws until they are declared unconstitutional by a court.  Thus my question.

The situation, however, is a little bit more complicated.  NPR explains it this way.

Has the Obama administration abrogated its responsibility by continuing to enforce DOMA, while refusing to defend it in court?

Justice Antonin Scalia: “And I’m wondering if we’re living in this new world where the attorney general can simply decide, ‘Yeah, it’s unconstitutional, but it’s not so unconstitutional that I’m not willing to enforce it.’ If we’re in this new world, I — I don’t want these cases like this to come before this court all the time. And I think they will come all the time if that’s … the new regime in the Justice Department that we’re dealing with.”

Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Sri Srinivasan: “Justice Scalia, one recognized situation in which an act of Congress won’t be defended in court is when the president makes a determination that the act is unconstitutional. That’s what happened here. The president made an accountable legal determination that this act of Congress is unconstitutional.”

Paul Clement, lawyer for GOP House leadership in defense of DOMA: “The House’s single most important prerogative, which is to pass legislation and have that legislation, if it’s going to be repealed, only be repealed through a process where the House gets to fully participate.”

Justice Kennedy: “Suppose that constitutional scholars have grave doubts about the practice of the president signing a bill but saying that he thinks it’s unconstitutional — what do you call it, signing statements or something like that? It seems to me that if we adopt your position that that would ratify and confirm and encourage that questionable practice because if the president thinks the law is unconstitutional, he shouldn’t sign it, according to some view. And that’s a lot like what you’re arguing here. It’s very troubling.”

Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Sri Srinivasan: “But my point is simply that when the president makes a determination that a statute is unconstitutional, it can follow that the Department of Justice won’t defend it in litigation.”

What should a President do in a situation like this one?  Does he just continue to enforce the law while trying to get Congress to repeal it as Paul Clement seems to argue.  Or does he do what he did:  say he thought the law was unconstitutional while both appealing and enforcing it.  I suppose that he could have issued an executive order to the IRS to accept joint tax returns from all legally married couples but that would have created an even bigger uproar that going to the Supreme Court.

My point, Mr. Chief Justice, is that yes, this may be an unprecedented situation, but the job of the Supreme Court and therefore your job is to make the ultimate decision on Constitutionality.  So just do your job.  And by the way, where did you go to law school?

Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the DOMA case,

Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the DOMA case.

Photograph Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

 

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The Supremes and Gay Marriage

There were wonderful thing said by some of the Justices today, but I want to concentrate on the cartoons.  Here are three from the Washington Post.

First Pat Oliphant.

Oliphant 3-26-2013

I love the duck in the corner reminding everyone that this is the same court that gave us corporations as people.

Moving on to Tom Toles.

Toles 3-26-2013

And finally Nick Anderson.

Anderson 3-26-2013

Do we have to say more?

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Law and Order: Life imitates art – or is the other way around?

I am a major fan of  Law and Order.  The original not any of the spin offs.  I still like to catch a re-run now and then and particularly like the older ones.  Last week a story in the New York Times about Robert M. Morgenthau the retired DA from Manhattan reminded me of the show.  Morgenthau is the model for the original DA, Adam Schiff, from the TV show. Morgenthau retired about three years ago at 90.  He had been DA for 35 years.

Morgenthau is still practicing law.

Mr. Morgenthau, 93, and two other prominent former prosecutors are asking the United States Supreme Court to take up the case of William Ernest Kuenzel, who has been on death row in Alabama for 24 years.

Based on the testimony of two witnesses, Mr. Kuenzel was convicted in 1988 of murdering a convenience store clerk. Records that became available only in 2010 revealed that those two witnesses — one of whom admitted that he himself was involved in the murder — actually did not implicate Mr. Kuenzel when they first spoke with the authorities. In fact, they originally gave entirely different accounts from what they testified to at trial, but the defense lawyer was unaware that their stories had changed. So were the jurors.

Mr. Morgenthau learned about the case from Jeffrey Glen, a law partner of his late son-in-law. Their firm, Anderson Kill & Olick, was working on the appeal, along with David Kochman. To Mr. Morgenthau’s disbelief, the case was rejected by federal courts in Alabama, which ruled that the new evidence did not “refute the possibility that the defendant committed the crime.”

“It’s so wrong to say there’s presumption of guilt because he was convicted once — without the newly discovered evidence,” Mr. Morgenthau said. “I just thought that was off the wall.”

So Mr. Morgenthau contacted 2 other former DA’s and they have filed a friend of the court brief for the Supreme Court asking them to take the case on appeal.

He contacted Gil Garcetti, who served 32 years in the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, and E. Michael McCann, who was the district attorney of Milwaukee for 38 years, and they agreed to join him in a friend-of-the-court brief.

The opening lines explained why their views were worth hearing: They wrote “from the unique perspective of having overseen and been ultimately responsible for more than 7,000,000 criminal prosecutions.”

The concept of new evidence was what led to the reversal of the conviction of five teenaged boys for the attempted murder of  a Central Park jogger.  In 2009 Carlin DeGuerin Miller wrote for a CBS blog

But his tenure hasn’t been without its share of detractors and controversies,
one of the biggest being the wrongful convictions in the 1989 Central Park
Jogger case. In 2002, DNA evidence surfaced that incriminated someone else in
the rape and Morgenthau himself appeared in court to agree with the defense
request to dismiss the charges.

A good prosecutor knows when to cut his losses.  According to the Times, Morgenthau said

“That was a matter of newly discovered evidence,” he said. “I had to act. This case reminded me of that.”

Law and Order lives on in re-runs and Robert Morgenthau is still fighting the good fight for real.

Robert M. Morgenthau is asking the United States Supreme Court to take on the case of a man who has been on death row in Alabama for 24 years.

Robert M. Morgenthau is asking the United States Supreme Court to take on the case of a man who has been on death row in Alabama for 24 years.

Photograph Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

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Chief Justice Roberts, voting rights and statistics

During the oral arguments for Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts quoted some statistics that, according to his interpretation, showed the turnout ratio of minority voters to white voters was worse in Massachusetts than in any other state.  This prompted a quick response from the Massachusetts election officials and a more measured one from Nate Silver on FiveThirtyEight.  As the Chief Justice may be learning, statistics are tricky things.

The day after the remarks by the Chief Justice the Globe headline was

Chief justice blasted over Mass. voting ‘cheap shot’

Talk about feeling insulted!  The nerve to compare us to Mississippi!

“Do you know which state has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American voter turnout?” Roberts asked Donald Verrilli Jr., solicitor general for the Department of Justice, during Wednesday’s arguments.

“I do not know that,” Verrilli answered.

“Massachusetts,” Roberts responded, adding that even Mississippi has a narrower gap.

Roberts later asked if Verrilli knew which state has the greatest disparity in registration. Again, Roberts said it was Massachusetts.

The problem is, Roberts is woefully wrong on those points, according to Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin, who on Thursday branded Roberts’s assertion a slur and made a declaration of his own. “I’m calling him out,” Galvin said.

Galvin was not alone in his view. Academics and Massachusetts politicians said that Roberts appeared to be misguided. A Supreme Court spokeswoman declined to offer supporting evidence of ­Roberts’s view, referring a ­reporter to the court transcript.

On Thursday,  Galvin tried to set the record straight. “We have one of the highest voter registrations in the country,” he said, “so this whole effort to make a cheap-shot point at Massachusetts is deceptive.”

Map of Section 5 Covered Jurisdictions

Map of Section 5 Covered Jurisdictions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So what’s going on here?  Trust Nate Silver to explain.

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which is being challenged by Shelby County, Ala., in the case before the court, requires that certain states, counties and townships with a history of racial discrimination get approval (or “pre-clearance”) from the Department of Justice before making changes to their voting laws. But Chief Justice Roberts said that Mississippi, which is covered by Section 5, has the best ratio of African-American to white turnout, while Massachusetts, which is not covered, has the worst, he said.

Chief Justice Roberts’s statistics appear to come from data compiled in 2004 by the Census Bureau, which polls Americans about their voting behavior as part of its Current Population Survey. In 2004, according to the Census Bureau’s survey, the turnout rate among white voting-aged citizens was 60.2 percent in Mississippi, while the turnout rate among African-Americans was higher, 66.8 percent. In Massachusetts, conversely, the Census Bureau reported the white turnout rate at 72.0 percent but the black turnout rate at just 46.5 percent.

As much as it pleases me to see statistical data introduced in the Supreme Court, the act of citing statistical factoids is not the same thing as drawing sound inferences from them. If I were the lawyer defending the Voting Rights Act, I would have responded with two queries to Chief Justice Roberts. First, are Mississippi and Massachusetts representative of a broader trend: do states covered by Section 5 in fact have higher rates of black turnout on a consistent basis? And second, what if anything does this demonstrate about the efficacy of the Voting Rights Act?

Turns out that the Current Population Survey has a very high margin of error.

One reason to be suspicious of the representativeness of Mississippi and Massachusetts is the high margin of error associated with these calculations, as noted by Nina Totenberg of NPR.

Like other polls, the Current Population Survey is subject to sampling error, a result of collecting data among a random subsample of the population rather than everyone in the state. In states like Massachusetts that have low African-American populations, the margin of error can be especially high: it was plus-or-minus 9.6 percentage points in estimating the black turnout rate in 2004, according to the Census Bureau. Even in Mississippi, which has a larger black population, the margin of error was 5.2 percentage points.

The other problem is that the Chief Justice was using 2004 figures when the 2010 numbers had a lower margin of error.  So what, if any thing can we conclude.

In the chart below, I have aggregated the 2004 turnout data into two groups of states, based on whether or not they are covered by Section 5. (I ignore states like New York where some counties are subject to Section 5 but others are not.) In the states covered by Section 5, the black turnout rate was 59.2 percent in 2004, while it was 60.8 percent in the states that are not subject to it. The ratio of white-to-black was 1.09 in the states covered by Section 5, but 1.12 in the states that are not covered by it. These differences are not large enough to be meaningful in either a statistical or a practical sense.

So did Chief Justice Roberts misconstrue the data? If he meant to suggest that states covered by Section 5 consistently have better black turnout rates than those that aren’t covered by the statute, then his claim is especially dubious. However, the evidence does support the more modest claim that black turnout is no worse in states covered by Section 5. There don’t seem to be consistent differences in turnout rates based on whether states are covered by Section 5 or not.

The bigger potential flaw with Chief Justice Roberts’s argument is not with the statistics he cites but with the conclusion he draws from them.

And here what Silver thinks we should be asking.

…the fact that black turnout rates are now roughly as high in states covered by Section 5 might be taken as evidence that the Voting Rights Act has been effective. There were huge regional differences in black turnout rates in the early 1960s, before the Voting Rights Act was passed. (In the 1964 election, for example, nonwhite turnout was about 45 percent in the South, but close to 70 percent elsewhere in the country.) These differences have largely evaporated now.

How much of this is because of the Voting Rights Act, as opposed to other voter protections that have been adopted since that time, or other societal changes? And even if the Voting Rights Act has been important in facilitating the changes, how many of the gains might be lost if the Section 5 requirements were dropped now?

To put it nicely, the Chief Justice is using correct statistics to come to not only the incorrect conclusion, but also to ask the wrong questions.  Silver concludes

These are difficult questions that the Supreme Court faces. They are questions of causality – and as any good lawyer knows, establishing a chain of causality is often the most difficult chore in a case.

Statistical analysis can inform the answers if applied thoughtfully. But statistics can obscure the truth when they become divorced from the historical, legal and logical context of a case.

We can only hope that some law clerk at the Supreme Court reads FiveThirtyEight and talks to enough Justices.  Given all the shenanigans going on in Section 5 covered and not covered states on voting rules, now is not the time to over turn this modest brake insuring voting rights.

Official 2005 photo of Chief Justice John G. R...

Official 2005 photo of Chief Justice John G. Roberts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Stephen Lynch maybe changes his mind

Ok.  People do change their minds.  They evolve, as President Obama has said about his position on gay marriage.  But if you change your mind, you need to actually change your mind, not just kinda change it because it is politically expedient.

We have all known for years that Representative Stephen Lynch is against abortion.  He has famously referred to himself as a pro-life Democrat.  And unlike the pro-choice Republicans, the Democratic party has not run him out of town.  But, that is not a winning position outside of his Southie constituency.  He is one of them and, so far, that has been enough to keep him in Congress.  Lynch now says that abortion should be legal but rare. So today the Boston Globe ran this story

US Representative Stephen F. Lynch, who has consistently described himself as an antiabortion legislator, said Monday that he believes abortion is a constitutionally protected right and that as a US senator he would actively oppose anti­abortion nominees to the Supreme Court.

…

Forces on both sides of the issue charge that Lynch is shifting his stance as he tries to expand beyond his socially conservative political base in South Boston to a liberal statewide primary.

“He’s trying to have it both ways,” said Megan Amundson, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts, a group backing abortion rights.

Anne Fox, president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, the state’s leading antiabortion group, pointed out that when Lynch was representing South Boston in the state Senate, he had a 100 percent voting ­record from her group. When he ran for Congress in 2001, her group mailed out postcards urging voters to support him.

Now, Lynch is vowing to protect Roe v. Wade.

“Apparently, that’s what they think they’re supposed to do, politicians with their eyes on higher office, at least in Massachusetts,” Fox said.

It seems that no one is happy with him now.

To give Lynch some credit, he voted against Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood noting that the work they do helps reduce the number of abortions.

But Mr. Lynch, you need to do better than

“I don’t oppose it. I accept, I guess.” – Feb. 4, 2013, Globe interview, speaking of Roe v. Wade.

Interesting move against an opponent, Representative Ed Markey, who has been publically pro-choice since 1983.  But I think Lynch may reflect the confusion of a lot of voters.  As I said, it will be interesting.

Official congressional portrait of Stephen F. ...

Official congressional portrait of Stephen F. Lynch, member of the , in the 110th Congress. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Taking the oath

President Obama just became the 16th President to take the oath of office for the second time.  There have been 57 inaugurations.

President Barack Obama is officially sworn-in by Chief Justice John Roberts in the Blue Room of the White House. | AP Photo

Josh Gerstein commented on Politico

Barack Obama and John Roberts were all smiles when the chief justice swore in  the president on Sunday — and they’ll likely repeat the performance on  Monday.

But the serene tableau obscures the tumultuous relationship between the two  men since their first awkward public interaction during the botched oath of  office four years ago.

On Sunday, Roberts read the oath from a piece of paper — and both men seemed  relieved when it was over. They exchanged congratulations and thanks, and then  Obama turned to his daughter Sasha. “I did it,” he told her.

Vice President Joe Biden was sworn in earlier by Justice Sotomayor.

Vice-president Joe Biden takes the oath

Obama Photograph AP

Biden photograph Carolyn Kaster/AP

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Clarence Speaks – and makes news

It has been seven years or so since Justice Clarence Thomas has said word at  Supreme Court during oral arguments so when he spoke, he made the news.  But he still hasn’t asked a question, so that streak is intact, and we aren’t really sure what he said.

According to the Washington Post

Thomas seemed to be making a lighthearted joke about lawyers trained at his alma mater, Yale Law School, or its rival, Harvard; the Ivy League is a common Thomas target. But several justices were speaking and laughing at the time, and Thomas’s exact comments apparently are lost to history.

Too bad.  This is what we have for a transcript.

Monday’s case was from Louisiana, and the question was whether years-long delays in funding lawyers for an indigent man facing the death penalty violated his right to a speedy trial.

Jonathan Boyer’s lawyer, Richard Bourke of New Orleans, said the delay meant that Boyer did not have lawyers competent to handle a complicated murder case that brought the prospect of the death penalty.

Justice Antonin Scalia, however, suggested that Boyer did have qualified lawyers. Didn’t one of them go to Yale? he asked Carla S. Sigler, the Louisiana assistant district attorney in the case.

She did, Sigler said. And didn’t another attend Harvard? Scalia asked. Yes, again, Sigler said.

“Son of a gun,” Scalia said.

Thomas was among the justices — all nine attended either Harvard or Yale — who either laughed or made side comments at that point.

All that appears in the transcript is Thomas saying, “Well — he did not — ”

It seems likely that the rest of the sentence was along the lines of “have competent counsel.” Sigler, smiling, replied: “I would refute that, Justice Thomas.”

Sotomayor, a Yale graduate, then asked Sigler what was enough to make a lawyer constitutionally adequate.

“Is it anybody who’s graduated from Harvard and Yale?”

More laughter.

“Or even just passed the bar?” Sotomayor asked.

“Or LSU law,” Sigler said, referring to Louisiana State University.

Thomas famously does not believe that the Justices should be asking pesky questions during oral argument believing that it is the time that the lawyers for each side should lay out their cases.  Other Justices don’t agree.

None of his colleagues, conservative or liberal, share such a view. They believe that the lawyers make their case in briefs filed with the court, and that oral arguments are the chance for the justices to challenge their theories and make them respond to their opponents’ arguments.

Makes me wonder if he reads any of the briefs.  He doesn’t have to because Justice Scalia is around to tell him how to vote.

English: The United States Supreme Court, the ...

English: The United States Supreme Court, the highest court in the United States, in 2009. Top row (left to right): Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer, and Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Bottom row (left to right): Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Associate Justice Antonin G. Scalia, and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Looking back at 2012 progressively

2012 was a pretty good year for those of a progressive/liberal political point of view and Winning Progressive has compiled a good summary.  You can read the entire article here, but I’ve pulled out some of my particular favorites – in my own order of significance.

First I have to talk about Mitch McConnell who not only lost his effort to make President Obama a one-termer, but last night voted to increase taxes.  (Although since it happened after we technically went off the cliff  at midnight, he will probably spin it as a decrease.)  I think he an John Boehner were the big losers last year, not Mitt.  Mitt is done with politics, but McConnell and Boehner have to continue to try to herd their Republican members and get re-elected.

President Obama re-elected

So now to some accomplishments.

* President Obama Re-Elected With A More Diverse and Progressive Congress– The November elections saw the re-election of President Obama and the election of four new progressive U.S. Senators – Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI).  In addition, Joe Lieberman (I-CT) is finally leaving the Senate!  On the House side, the Democrats elected in November will be the first major party caucus in US history that is majority female and people of color.  New House progressives will include Alan Grayson (FL-09), Jared Huffman (CA-02), Dan Kildee (MI-05), Ann McLane Kuster (NH-02), Grace Meng (NY-06), Patrick Murphy (FL-18), Rick Nolan (MN-08), Mark Pocan (WI-02), Raul Ruiz (CA-36), Carol Shea-Porter (NH-01), Mark Tacano (CA-41), Hakeem Jeffries (NY-08), and Kyrsten Simena (AZ-09).  On the flip side, tea party conservatives Allen West (FL), Chip Cravaack (MN), Bobby Schilling (IL), Roscoe Bartlett (MD), Ann-Marie Buerkle (NY), Francisco Canseco (TX), and Joe Walsh (IL) were all defeat and, hopefully, will never be heard from politically again.

* LGBT Equality– 2012 was, of course, a banner year for advancing LGBT equality.  For the first time in US history, equality was supported by a majority of voters facing ballot proposals approving marriage equality in Maine, Washington, and Maryland, and refusing to ban equality in Minnesota. The first openly lesbian U.S. Senator, Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) was elected in November as were a record seven openly-gay House members.  President Obama publicly supported marriage equality, and anti-equality forces in Iowa failed in their effort to recall a state Supreme Court justice who declared that state’s ban on marriage equality unconstitutional.  In February, a federal appellate court ruled California’s anti-marriage equality Proposition 8 unconstitutional, and two federal courts in 2012 did the same with the Defense of Marriage Act.

* Health Care Reform – In a decision that surprised many commentators, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka “ObamaCare.”And while the GOP-controlled House has voted at least 33 times to repeal ObamaCare, President Obama’s re-election in November virtually guarantees that will never occur.   In implementing ObamaCare, the Obama Administration, standing up to strong opposition from conservative religious organizations, finalized rules requiring that contraception be included as a preventive health service that insurance policies must cover with no co-pay.  This will help millions of women afford access to birth control and also save money by reducing unintended pregnancies.

Those are my personal big three.

Yes, there is a lot left to do and a lot that happened that I didn’t particularly think was terrific, but on the first day of a new year, we should celebrate our successes!

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The Supremes and getting married

Marriage is several things.  It is a contract between two people recognized by the state and it is a spiritual and, for some, a religious bond.  When my parents were married in a Buddhist ceremony, one of their friends, a Jewish lawyer, is alleged to have said in a stage whisper, “It doesn’t matter what ritual is used, it’s still just a contract.”  I wish I had thought to ask him about this when I became an adult, but true or not it makes a nice story.

Yes, same sex couples can live together and in some places they can have a recognized civil union which may provide some benefits, but it is not the same as being married.  I can tell you from personal experience that they create very different states of mind.  Being married provides a level of comfort and security just living together does not.  And part of this comes from marriage being a contract.  Yes, all types of relationships fail and they fail for as many reasons as there are failures, but marriages are more difficult to sever therefore can provide more of a base on which a relationship can grow.

I’ve been writing about gay marriage as states are added to the list and I’ve been watching the attitude of the country toward gay marriage change.  Chris Cillizza posted two helpful charts on his Washington Post blog, the Fix.

Pretty amazing change is a relatively short period of time.  And Democrats have gone from not wanting to touch the issue to running for office supporting gay marriage in the space of one presidential election cycle.  This change was reflected at the ballot box.  I am happy that Washington State, Maryland, and Maine voted to legalize same sex marriage, but I still have this voice in the back of my head that says equal rights are not something that should be determined by a majority vote.

The Boston Globe reported

Last month, Washington, Maine, and Maryland became the first states to pass same-sex marriage by popular vote. They joined six other states — New York, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont — and the District of Columbia that had already enacted laws or issued court rulings permitting same-sex marriage.

And now the Supreme Court will be ruling on the issue.  The New York Times explains

One of the cases, from California, could establish or reject a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The justices could also rule on narrower grounds that would apply only to marriages in California.

The second case, from New York, challenges a federal law that requires the federal government to deny benefits to gay and lesbian couples married in states that allow such unions.

The California case was brought by the two lawyers who were on opposing sides in the infamous, Bush v. Gore case, Ted Olson and David Boies.  The second case is one of several that challenged the Defense of Marriage Act or DOMA.  It is interesting that the Massachusetts case is not the one being heard.

There was reason to think that Justice Elena Kagan was not free to hear an appeal from the Boston case because she had worked on it or a related case as United States solicitor general. The current solicitor general, Donald B. Verrilli Jr., gave the court a number of other options, including Windsor, probably partly to make sure that a case of such importance could be heard by a full nine-member court.

Edith Windsor of New York sued to be treated as a surviving spouse

The Obama Administration is not defending DOMA.

Chris Cillizza ended his post with this thought.

Go deeper into the Pew numbers — and thanks to Pew, you can! —  and you see why those trend lines won’t be reversing themselves.  In 2011-2012, 62 percent of people 18-29 supported gay marriage — by far the strongest support among any age group. During that same time period, just 32 percent of those 65 or older supported gay marriage.

The simple truth: Support for gay marriage tracks directly with age. The younger you are, the more likely you are to support it. Given that, it’s hard to imagine gay marriage getting less popular as the years go on.

Whatever the Supreme Court does with its two gay marriage cases next year, the die has been cast on the politics of the issue. By the 2016 presidential election, this could well be a decided issue that neither party — yes, that includes Republicans — spends much time talking about.

My guess is that the Supreme Court will overturn DOMA and rule that states can allow gay marriage if they want.  We will see in a few months if I’m right.

Photograph – Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

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