Boehner to spend up to $500,000 to defend DOMA

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In response to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) demands that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) release the cost to taxpayers of the Republicans’ legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act — which the Department of Justice earlier declined to defend — the contract signed with former Bush solicitor general Paul Clement has been released. Josh Gerstein of Politico reports that Clement and his firm will earn up to $520 per hour and up to a total of $500,000 to defend the law in court.

By way of contrast, Title X funding for family planning and cancer screening, the argument over which nearly shut down the government earlier this month, costs the government $327 million in total each year.

Boehner has said that he wants to strip the cost of the DOMA defense from the Department of Justice’s operating budget. The DOJ requested a 2012 discretionary budget of $28.2 billion in February.