When Jurisprudence Runs Counter to Preference
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care benefits extended to an employee of the Commonwealth’s spouse – as defined under Section 3 – is excluded from an employee’s taxable income and the Commonwealth is not obligated to pay taxes on the value. However, the value of the benefits Massachusetts extends to the spouse in a single-sex marriage is considered taxable and must be calculated as additional employee income for the purposes of the Commonwealth’s obligation (costing an additional $122,607.69 since the recognition of same-sex marriages). Coakley argued that this creates an unconstitutional dilemma for the Commonwealth which essentially reduces its choice to either honoring its Constitutional mandate to recognize same-sex marriages and incurring a large monetary burden both by increased tax obligation and deprivation of federal funds, or allowing state officials to implement a federal policy of discrimination. Coakley further argued that the Tenth Amendment “expressly reserves to the states all powers except those limited powers granted to the federal government” which protects “the division of powers between the states and federal government” (Commonwealth Compl. 2009, 22). Thus, Congress lacks the authority to create an “extensive federal regulatory scheme that interferes with and undermines the Commonwealth’s sovereign authority” to manage as a state its own internal affairs. Additionally, she charged that “Congress lacks the authority under Article I of the United States Constitution to regulate… marriage,” as the definition of marriage falls into the field of domestic relations, which has been consistently recognized as a confirmed attribute of state sovereignty (22). This sovereignty, she claimed, is violated by Section 3 of DoMA in which the federal government forces the Commonwealth to treat same-sex marriages differently than they treat traditional marriages. Thus, DoMA is a regulation of the Commonwealth as a state which impedes the ability of the Commonwealth to administer its own domestic relation law and thereby, indirectly, defining marriage for not just federal purposes, but for the purposes of the Commonwealth. Finally, Coakley charged that “enforcement of Section 3 of DoMA unconstitutionally commandeers the Commonwealth and its employees as agents of the federal government’s [attempt to implement] a discriminatory federal policy” which Printz v. United States (1997)7 forbids (22). The United States Department of Health and Human Services, as the defendant in this case, refuted both the charges that DoMA’s Section 3 unconstitutionally intrudes on traditional attributes of state sovereignty by defining marriage and that it coerces the Commonwealth by presenting an unconstitu7 The question before the Supreme Court in Printz v. United States was whether Congress could require state employees (here, law enforcement officials) to carry out specified duties (background checks on potential hand-gun purchasers) in order to implement federal policy. The court ruled that such a “commandeering” of state officials offended the Tenth Amendment, as it impeded upon the State as a sovereign entity.