Over the weekend, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called for Congress to withhold funding from the Justice Department based on President Obama's decision to stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act.
“I believe the House Republicans next week should pass a resolution instructing the president to enforce the law and to obey his own Constitutional oath,” Gingrich said, “and should say, if he fails to do so, that they will zero out the office of Attorney General.”
There's only one problem. The Obama administration didn't say they would stop enforcing DOMA. In fact, in his letter to Speaker John Boehner, Attorney General Eric Holder explicitly said that DOMA would continue to be enforced until overturned by the courts or repealed by Congress. The Obama administration will cease defending the law in court, which may ultimately contribute to its being overturned, but it is not refusing to "enforce" the law. Moreover, it is precisely because the administration believes the law is unconstitutional that refusing to defend it is consistent with the oath of office. As Marcy Wheeler points out, the Bush administration, through its use of signing statements, actually did refuse to enforce laws -- but most Republicans only retain reservations about the imperial executive when Democrats are in power.
Gingrich has long been portrayed as the kind of Republican more focused on policy than red meat, but whether or not that reputation was ever truly earned, it's long past its vintage. Gingrich's contributions to the political discourse over the past few years have been mind-numbingly stupid, from his embrace of a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West to his endorsement of Dinesh D'Souza's pseudo birtherist characterization of the president as a "Kenyan Anti-Colonialist" to his book arguing that Obama is a bigger threat to America than Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Now that Gingrich appears poised to announce a presidential exploratory committee (his odd history with them notwithstanding), it's time to stop pretending that he's somehow more policy oriented or less extreme than the other candidates. Gingrich is just as likely as Sarah Palin to offer culture-war demagoguery in place of substantive policy arguments; the only difference is that he's more successful at framing culture-war red meat in pseudo-intellectual terms.
