U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Tauro rule that the law, which bans federal recognition of same-sex marriages, violated the Constitution because it interfered with a state’s right to define what constitutes a legal marriage. President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law in the midst of the 1996 presidential campaign season.

The ruling covered two separate cases in which gay couples had challenged the law in a Massachusetts court because while the state has recognized same-sex marriages since 2004, they were still denied federal benefits like Medicaid.

Evan Wolfson, executive director of the pro-gay marriage group Freedom to Marry, said he believed Tauro’s ruling was a historic blow to discrimination.

“Today’s ruling affirms what we have long known: federal discrimination enacted under DOMA is unconstitutional,” he said in a statement. “The decision will be appealed and litigation will continue.  But what we witnessed in the courtroom cannot be erased: federal marriage discrimination harms committed same-sex couples and their families for no good reason.”

Brian Brown, president of the anti-gay marriage group National Organization for Marriage, dragged Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan into the fray in his response to the ruling.

“Under the guidance of Elena Kagan’s brief that she filed when she was Solicitor General, Obama’s justice department deliberately sabotaged this case,” he said in a statement.

NOM Chair Maggie Gallagher suggested in the same statement that Tauro wanted to start another culture war.

“Does he really want another Roe. v. Wade?” she said. “The simple fact is that the right of the federal government to define marriage for the purposes of its federal law and federal territories has been clear since the late 19th century, when Congress banned polygamy. Only an incompetent defense could have lost this case. We expect to win in a higher court.”

Kagan was a clerk for Marshall.

Franken laid out his argument by noting that numerous cases decided by the current Supreme Court would easily be construed as “activist” according to the Republican definition.

To Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., he said:

You said there are three things that judges hold to when they’re not activists. You said that they respect precedent. They make narrow decisions and they defer to the political branches, in other words the legislature. And there are a lot of recent cases that we’ve been talking about that instinctively strike me and a lot of other people as falling outside of these three guidelines. And I think that in these cases the Supreme Court was legislating from the bench, which is being activist.

But, Franken said, Brown v. Board of Education was not one of them. And that Thurgood was not an activist judge.

Here’s Franken’s full statement:

“I wish I didn’t have to talk about this issue,” Klobuchar said. “There was a lengthy long article this weekend in one of our major newspapers… talking about, at length, her leg-crossing style. Now I have to say, Mr. President, that I took note of this since it was compared to my leg-crossing style. I have to say I never thought I would be discussing this in this chamber.”

“I don’t think such an article about was ever written about Chief Justice Roberts,” she said, noting how ridiculous an article criticizing Roberts’ leg-crossing at a meeting would be.

“Or was such an article written about Justice Alito? was such an article written by Justice Renquist?” she added.

Here’s video of Klobuchar’s full remarks:

OpenSecrets.org found that Sotomayor hasn’t made a political donation since joining the federal bench in 1992, while others on Obama’s shortlist — especially those who aren’t judges — made lots of them.

Elena Kagan, for example, gave Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign the maximum allowed: $4,600. She was dean of Harvard Law School before Obama appointed her U.S. Solicitor General this year.

Diane Wood made $1,250 in political donations during the 1992 election cycle, the lion’s share going to Bill Clinton, who appointed her to the federal Court of Appeals in 1995. Wood’s current husband has given $5,000 in the past six years, almost half of that to Obama.

Records of political giving haunt several of Minnesota’s sitting high-court justices. Three of the five Minnesota Supreme Court justices who will hear oral arguments in Coleman v. Franken on Monday have made donations to current or past candidates for the seat that’s in dispute. All gave before they were named to the high court.

Two are from past election cycles: Justice Helen Meyer gave to the late Democratic U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone’s 2002 re-election campaign, and Justice Lori Gildea donated to Coleman’s unsuccessful 1998 run for governor as a Republican.

Justice Christopher Dietzen gave $250 to the “Coleman for Senator 08” campaign committee in 2004,  11 months before Gov. Tim Pawlenty appointed him to the state Supreme Court.

None of the three has recused himself or herself from judging Coleman’s appeal of the election contest court ruling that showed Franken won the U.S. Senate race by 312 votes.

Chief Justice Eric Magnuson and Associate Justice G. Barry Anderson have not participated in any of the high court’s proceedings or deliberations related to the Senate election. They served on the State Canvassing Board late last year, which found that Franken had won the statewide hand recount of 2.9 million ballots cast.