What the Court Didn't Say AFTER the Supreme Court struck down a core provision of the Defense of Marriage Act last month, some legal scholars and many Americans assumed that the ruling automatically extended federal immigration benefits to the same-sex foreign spouses of United States citizens. The Obama administration also adopted this view. On July 1, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said she had directed Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of her department, to "review immigration visa petitions filed on behalf of a same-sex spouse in the same manner as those filed on behalf of an opposite-sex spouse." However, in our view, this executive action is not consistent with the law. In the DOMA case, United States v. Windsor, a five-member majority of the court found that Section 3 of the law, which denied federal recognition of same-sex marriages, violated the due-process clause of the Constitution. But the ruling also explicitly affirmed Congress's power to enact laws that bear on marital rights and privileges. It noted, for example, that a marriage "entered into for the purpose of procuring an alien's admission as an immigrant" to the United States is not valid for obtaining lawful status, even if it is valid under state law. To be sure, the court stressed the dignity of marriage and the importance of equality in marriages. But it left open federal regulation in some instances. And on the specific issue of Congressional authority to regulate immigration benefits for same-sex partners, the court was silent. This is now an area of significant legal ambiguity. In a 1982 case, Adams v. Howerton, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that Congress intended to define a citizen's "spouse," in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, only as a person of the opposite sex. The case involved a couple - Richard Adams, an American, and Anthony Sullivan, an Australian - who in 1975 obtained a marriage certificate from the clerk of Boulder County, Colo. The couple then attempted to have Mr. Sullivan classified as an immediate relative, as a route toward lawful immigration status. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (since reorganized) denied the petition. The Ninth Circuit held that even if the marriage was valid under Colorado law, the marriage nonetheless did not provide for immigration benefits. In Adams, one of the earliest same-sex marriage cases to reach the federal courts, the Ninth Circuit faced two questions: first, whether a citizen's "spouse," under federal immigration law, must be someone of the opposite sex, and, if so, whether this was constitutional. The court began by pointing out that Congress did not intend the mere validity of a marriage under state law to be decisive in the context of immigration policy (a point reaffirmed in last month's Supreme Court decision). The Ninth Circuit then turned specifically to the issue of same-sex marriages and concluded that Congress did not intend to confer immigration benefits to same-sex couples. Important for us today, the decision was based primarily on the language of the act. Nothing in the act, major amendments adopted in 1965 or the legislative history since then suggests that Congress intended "spouse" to include a person of the same sex (although, in 1990, Congress removed homosexuality as a grounds for exclusion). Is a case from three decades ago still meaningful? We argue it is. As recently as 2010, a federal court in California, in a case brought by a gay couple married there, Luis Torres-Barragan and Patrick Clark, found that the precedent from Adams was still binding. The couple appealed, but the case ended after the Obama administration in 2011 declared that it would continue to enforce DOMA but would no longer defend it in court. Under the Constitution, as the decisions in Windsor and Adams recognize, Congress has almost total power over immigration, and its decisions in this realm are subject to limited judicial review. Where there is only a rational basis for Congress's exercise of power, whether articulate or not, courts must uphold the immigration laws that Congress enacts. In our view, the DOMA decision does not appear to override the Ninth Circuit's 1982 ruling. The Supreme Court last month recognized the constitutionality of limited federal laws that regulate the meaning of marriage to further policy - for example, in regulating immigration - but concluded that DOMA was simply too broad, as applied across the full spectrum of federal activity. At the end of its opinion in Windsor, the court was very clear to confine its holding to "those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect." Because immigration is reserved to the federal government, the 13 states that have legalized same-sex marriage (along with the District of Columbia) cannot, by definition, protect through their marriage laws same-sex couples seeking immigration benefits. Same-sex marriage and immigration policy are both matters of immense national interest, about which reasonable Americans have strongly held points of view. As Congress debates proposals to overhaul our immigration laws, it should also take up the issue of immigration benefits for same-sex couples, to provide clarity given the legal uncertainty around this matter. The Supreme Court has not settled this question, and the Obama administration should not act as though it has.