So twenty bankruptcy judges in California have now joined with a handful of other federal trial judges around the country to throw down the gauntlet to Congress and reject the authority of Section 3 of DOMA as a basis to discriminate against same-sex married couples. It will be interesting to see whether Speaker Boehner and his majority in the House Advisory Group (which consists of the Speaker plus the top two officials from each party in the House) decides to attempt to appeal this ruling to the 9th Circuit, a court before which is pending the appeal from former District Judge Vaughan Walker's decision last summer holding California Proposition 8 unconstitutional, a court that recently upheld the application of heightened scrutiny to the discharge of a highly valued Air Force nurse who happened to be a lesbian, and a court that is still considering the government's appeal of a federal court decision declaring the DADT policy facially unconstitutional, even in the wake of Congress's passage last December of a statute that provisionally repealed that policy. One suspects that the 9th Circuit is not the place where the House Republican leadership would want this issue to be decided.