A majority of the House voted for the Federal Marriage Amendment.

* A majority of the House voted for the Federal Marriage Amendment. The amendment did not get the supermajority necessary to amend the Constitution. But the vote, along with referenda in Louisiana, Missouri, and elsewhere, made it clear that if courts proceed to impose same-sex marriage, they will be doing so over the objections of the public. The battle will have to be carried into a new Congress next year. When Congress again takes up the issue, let's hope it is not distracted by the bogus questions that erstwhile conservative stalwart Chris Cox raised about the issue. On the day of the debate, Representative Cox became the Republican whom liberals most liked to quote, for he had published an op-ed against the amendment. Now, conservatives can oppose the amendment for various reasons. But Cox's argument was a far cry from the crisp logic we expect from him. He suggested, in passing, that marriage law should be left to the states. But he hardly addressed the fear that inspired the proposal for an amendment in the first place: namely, that a series of state judicial edicts was preparing the ground for the federal courts to impose same-sex marriage nationally, without a vote of the people. Cox's main argument was that the amendment would give federal judges too much power. The amendment stipulates that judges may not require states to give same-sex couples those governmental benefits that come with marriage. Cox claims that judges will define the benefits of marriage narrowly, and then grant everything else to same-sex couples; so the amenders would have defeated themselves. All Cox has demonstrated here, however, is that an argument can be at once convoluted and obtuse. He posits that judges are so ideologically corrupt that they will read an express limitation on their power to promote the recognition of same-sex couples as an expansion of their power to do just that. But such unscrupulous judges can use the existing constitutional text to accomplish these goals. On Cox's reasoning, the 26th Amendment should not have been adopted because judges would somehow use it to take away 18-year-olds' right to vote. No amendment can foreclose the possibility of judicial willfulness, but amendments can constrain that willfulness. We need the FMA, or something like it, to block what bids fair to become an epidemic of such willfulness--as most conservative congressmen, thankfully, are able to see.