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House Republicans are expected to move Friday to assert themselves as defenders of the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 law that bars federal recognition of same-sex marriages. Last month, the Obama administration said it had decided the law was unconstitutional, and had directed the Justice Department to stop defending it in court.

While Republican rebukes to Mr. Obama’s decision were largely muted, Speaker John Boehner has said that the Republican-controlled House would likely make a move to defend the law.

In an television interview Wednesday night, Mr. Boehner called the President’s decision “outrageous”. He added: “It’s the law of the land. It’s the job of the Justice Department to defend the work of our government. And I just think it’s outrageous. We’re looking at our options, what’s available to us to intervene. The short – the long and the short of this is that we are going to intervene. The question is how do we do it.”

Under federal law, whenever the executive branch declines to defend a statute it believes is unconstitutional, the Attorney General must inform Congress of that decision, which he has in this case, and lawmakers must then determine whether to appoint their own lawyer to defend the statute in court.

This decision can be done through a resolution, or via the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, made up of the three majority leaders and two most senior minority members in the House; the majority can then instruct the House General Counsel, on behalf of the House, to seek to intervene
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Neal Devins, a professor of law at William and Mary Law School, said that such disputes between the legislative and executive branches tend to center around the separation of powers, so the case around the marriage act is unusual. “The House can appear as an amicus or ask the court to appoint it as a party in the case,” he said.

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HONOLULU – President Obama, who wraps up his 11-day Hawaiian escape Monday night and returns to Washington on Tuesday, will sign a far-reaching overhaul of the nation’s food safety system into law when he gets back to the White House. But he is likely to face a fight from budget-minded Republicans over the cost of the measure, estimated at $1.4 billion over five years.

The legislation would greatly strengthen the regulatory hand of the Food and Drug Administration, giving it new authority to order mandatory recalls and to require importers to show that the food they get from foreign suppliers is safe. Kathleen Sebelius, Mr. Obama’s health secretary, told reporters in a conference call set up by the White House on Monday that the idea is for “sea bass from Chile’’ to meet the same safety standards “as lobster that we get out of the shores of Maine.’’

The bill, which has the backing of food-safety advocates and industry groups, passed the Senate with considerable bipartisan support. Ms. Sebelius called it, “the most significant food safety law of the last 100 years.’’ Under the current system, the F.D.A. simply tracks outbreaks after they occur; the new law will change the agency’s mission to focus on preventing outbreaks before they happen.

But with Republicans, who are set to take control of the House when the new Congress convenes on Wednesday, vowing to slash domestic spending on a variety of fronts, advocates fear lawmakers will not appropriate the full amount necessary to put the law into effect. On the conference call Monday, the commissioner of Food and Drugs, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, said she intended to work with industry and advocacy groups to persuade Congress to appropriate the money.

“Shifting from a reactive to a preventive mode is something that we are committed to doing,’’ Dr. Hamburg said. “Congress has clearly given us the mandate to take that on, industry wants to work with us.’’ She added, “The costs of not going forward to put in place this kind of approach are simply unacceptable.’’

The measure has been a high priority of Mr. Obama’s since the beginning of his administration. But there will be no formal signing ceremony when he puts his signature to it on Tuesday, according to his deputy press secretary Bill Burton. The president and his family are scheduled to leave Honolulu at 8:45 p.m. local time, and should be back in Washington — perhaps feeling a bit jet-lagged after a 9 1/2-hour overnight flight — by late morning.

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Pencil it in: The next GOP vice presidential nominee will be Hispanic. That’s my prediction, at least. There are primarily two reasons for this. First, of course, is math: Hispanics represent a growing percentage of the voting population, and there is reason to believe they are “winnable” for Republicans. As Texas Rep. Lamar Smith recently [...]

Former Sen. Mark Dayton held a razor-thin margin over Republican Tom Emmer early Wednesday in the Minnesota governor’s race, virtually assuring a recount. With fewer than 20 percent of the state’s precincts uncounted, Dayton held a lead of less than half of 1 percent over Emmer — about 9,000 votes, according to the Minneapolis Star [...]

If Republican Senate candidate and tea party favorite Christine O’Donnell loses next week in Delaware as polls now predict, she will have been undone by faith — not her own Roman Catholicism, but by evangelical Christianity. It was the pro-life, former anti-masturbation crusader’s appeal to the devout in the primary that have made her so [...]

The pool of voters considered likely to go to the polls this November tilts strongly conservative and Republican with moderates and Democrats at their lowest ebb when compared to the last four midterm elections, according to Gallup’s analysis of its data collected between Sept. 23 and Oct. 3. Different pollsters arrive at how they construct [...]