In the latest National Review, Robert Bork contends the Obama administration’s decision to stop defending the federal Defense of Marriage Act “depends upon a repudiation of originalism as the preferred mode of constitutional interpretation”:
The Obama-Holder dismissal of originalism is an assertion that the interpreter of the Constitution, be it a court or a legislature or an executive-branch official, is free to attribute to the Constitution any position he favors. Situations in which executive-branch officials believe a law is unconstitutional are not unknown, but the officials have almost always handled them very differently than this president and attorney general have done.
For a sense of why a reliance on originalism works better than the approach our president and attorney general have pursued, you might wish to consult the words of U.S. Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.
