Overturning the Defense of Marriage Law

Barack Obama is not the first president to conclude that he has the power to decide when laws are to be enforced and which ones. Richard Nixon famously said, “When you're in office, you have to do a lot of things that are not, in the strictest sense of the law, legal. But you do them because they're in the greater interests of the nation.”

Using the Nixon interpretation of law any president can do almost anything. Richard Nixon would have been impeached and found guilty of protecting law breakers had he not resigned from office. It appears that those who succeeded President Nixon have not learned from his mistakes.