Obama and Constitutional Rights

Two articles that appeared two days apart, but didn't really seem to get a lot of attention from the mainstream media, have captured my attention and have made me start to question how strongly the Obama administration is going to work to uphold the US Constitution.

The first is about a challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act. According to a Justice Department lawyer who is defending the DOMA, the law is constitutional and therefore, the Obama administration has to defend it in court even though the administration would rather see the law repealed. According to the article in the Boston Globe:

Congress had a legitimate rationale to pass the federal law 14 years ago, [the Justice Department lawyer] said, given that some states had begun discussing legalizing same-sex marriage. The statute, he said, preserved the status quo — marriage reserved strictly for heterosexuals — and prevented federal agencies from having to keep track of which states had legalized gay marriages and which had not.

Oh, come on! In this computer age, how hard is it to keep track of which states have legalized gay marriage and which have not? Additionally, preserving the status quo is not a constitutional thing to do when the status quo involves keeping one group of citizens at a lower "status" than all the rest or prevents them from being able to act on their civil rights, which the US Supreme Court has already said applies to marriage. If you read the Loving v Virginia ruling, the US Supreme Court overturned the miscegenation laws for these two reasons: that the laws themselves were unconstitutional and that the wide variety of laws and rights given interracial married couples was so confusing that it didn't allow for the full faith and credit clause or equal treatment under the law to be enforced.

DOMA is clearly unconstitutional in that it most certainly singles out a group of citizens and denies them a civil right.

The second story alarmed me even a bit more because it involved the Miranda rights of "suspected terrorists". US Attorney General Eric Holder says that Congress should give serious consideration to amending the laws regarding Miranda rights. He says that law enforcement personnel have to be able to ask a suspected terrorist about public safety risks before advising them of their right to remain silent.

While this seems to be a good thing, what if someone they have picked up as a "suspected terrorist" isn't really a terrorist at all? Just someone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? And they keep this guy locked up for how long questioning and questioning him without ever reading him his rights?

And if they can do it because of "public safety concerns" for "suspected terrorists", then why not doing the same thing to murder suspects or suspected child abductors since there is a public safety aspect with regards to those who are doing the searching for the missing person who was murdered/abducted? And what about arson suspects? There's public safety issues there? Or what about anti-choice protesters who crowd the sidewalks and make them impassable? There's public safety issues there as well! So let's arrest them and not read them their Miranda rights because there's a public safety issue at stake!

That is the precedent that will be set and as has been shown throughout history, the intent of the law is not always how the law works in the real world. I'm absolutely certain that the second amendment was not meant to allow private citizens to own handguns that can shoot out bullets faster than you can draw the gun. But there's a whole lot of people who would disagree with me.

Of course, there is the possibility that the Obama administration is saying/doing these things so it can say to the more conservative leaning voters "Hey, we tried!" Of course, they're taking the risk of alienating the groups that help put him in office.