This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 24, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court is likely to hear a challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act in its next term,

according to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

So what will that case look like?

Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute,

ponders how the Supreme Court might end DOMA.

It is almost certain to come before the Supreme Court in one form or another

and they have some choice of which cases to take but what has happened over the last couple

of years is that rather dramatically a whole bunch of federal courts I think the

number is up to seven now, have decided that part of DOMA is unconstitutional.

And because DOMA is a federal statute, because seriously taking it as partly unconstitutional would require the government to change

a lot of programs, Social Security, Medicaid, many others.

The federal government has to get some certainty as to what the law is.

Unlike some areas of law, it can't very well leave it to the circuits and say, well, we'll recognize the marriages in New York but not in Iowa.

And that's because there are so many federal programs that are dependent upon this

definition of marriage. It's extremely important in a lot of programs and the cases have bubbled up in federal employment

for example where one of the very first cases was in California where Judge Alex Kaczynski, often cited as one of the most

Libertarian federal judges, decided, it was around 97 or 98, that an employee of his court who was asking for medical benefits for her spouse was entitled to them because DOMA was unconstitutional as applied to that issue and that is one of

the cases that is now percolating upward through the courts.

Golinsky versus Office of Personnel Management.

So just to be clear, the case that will likely

...