Domestic Partner Benefits and the Courts

Joe Davidson writes that the California judges who issued initial opinions on whether the Office of Personnel Management can open the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program to the spouses of gay and lesbian federal employees in states whether they are allowed to marry have issued final decisions reiterating their opinions, and ordering OPM to act. It's an interesting conundrum. I reported on this fairly extensively this spring, and it was hard to get an answer on what OPM would do. Their spokesmen referred me to the White House, which said simply that they want legislation, which is not really an answer to whether the administration will comply with a court order. OPM has maintained that they don't have the authority to comply with the court order until Congress acts, which brings all of this down to fairly intractable and differing interpretations of the law. To me, that sounds like a recipe for deadlock rather than compliance. But we'll just have to see.