From The Whiskey Bar, 7/14/04 re: the GOP bid to invoke cloture on the Unequal Rights Amendment failed:

The real threat, though, is being cooked up over in our Chamber of People's Deputies, where the gauleiters are hard at work on a bill that would deny the federal courts jurisdiction over challenges to the Heterosexual Supremecy Act (otherwise known as the Defense of Marriage Act.)

Trying to carve out special-interest exceptions to Marbury v. Madison has become something of a cottage industry for authoritarian conservatives in recent years - it's another of Tom DeLay's stratagems in his campaign to turn the federal judiciary into an even more docile version of the House Republican Caucus.

The implications are much more ominious than the constitutional amendment circus, and potentially go far beyond the gay marriage "issue." Taken to its extreme (which is where DeLay and his crew can usually be found) the jurisdictional dodge could be a backdoor way to get at a whole slew of constitutional protections the far right doesn't like very much - not by repealing them (which would also run afoul of that pesky supermajority requirement for constitutional amendments) but by systematically removing any remedy in the federal or state courts.

Constitutional? Probably not. But, given that the Rehnquist Court itself has already shown a lusty willingness to slam courthouse doors in the faces of those advancing federal constitutional claims, the question becomes: Who's going to stop them?