The law and its officers

[fpb]

Point one: Mr Eric Holder, the United States' chief law enforcement officer, has announced that his department will not defend lawsuits involving the Defence of Marriage Act, a federal law duly passed by Congress and signed by (a Democrat) President.
Point two: In Italian law there is a crime called omission of an official duty, which carries, I believe, a jail term.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Indeed -- this would be termed "misfeasance" in America (it's "malfeasance" if done with bad intent). Holder could be prosecuted for this, and he's skating on increasingly thinner ice as Obama's Administration loses support in both Congress and the Courts. Obama and Holder have both made this worse by deliberate defiance of both.

Holder's done this before, too, on a more serious matter: the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

Yes, this announcement was made some years ago, when Obama was still pretending to oppose gay marriage.

I am peripherally involved in a current lawsuit challenging the DOMA: it turns out Congress has its own legal staff (the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, with the unpleasant acronym BLAG) which had to petition the judge for permission to provide a defense of the DOMA, because the DOJ lawyers won't.

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There actually is a respectable argument to be made that the President has a duty to refuse to defend in court laws which he believes to be unconstitutional -- it doesn't fit well in the mouths of those who think "constitutional" is a synonym for "good" and "unconstitutional" for "bad," but it's respectable.