This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 28th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Oral arguments before the Supreme Court on gay marriage continued yesterday, but on a wholly different aspect of the issue

what is the constitutional federal role in defining marriage?

Cato Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies, Ilia Shapiro attended oral arguments.

We spoke yesterday.

Today was DOMA in one particular section, section 3, which restricts federal benefits, or at least the definition of marriage for purposes

of all federal laws, there are over a thousand laws that are affected, to heterosexual couples. And the issue here is there is a woman who's lawfully

married wife passed away and she had to pay 360,000000 of estate tax that she wouldn't have had the federal government

recognized her marriage like heterosexual marriage.

And so the issue is can the government make that distinction?

And it's not an issue of whether there's a different part of DOMA section 2 that says

states don't have to recognize sister states gay marriages it's not that this is purely

about how the federal government treats different types of marriage so what's the

big takeaway from the case what were the arguments presented that the justice has tried to grapple with?

Today, like yesterday, about half of it was jurisdictional.

There's an issue of what role the federal government is even playing here because this administration

decided after one lower court loss to stop defending DOMA in the courts.

They're walking this tightrope of enforcing it as a matter of administrative law, the Social

Security Administration, the IRS, etc, but not defending it in court and the

Supreme Court accepted the government's petition to review this case and now they're questioning

whether they should have done that and also the defenders of the law because of

...