No, the House did *Not* Vote to do X, Y, or Z

I keep seeing stories like this. "Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted to ban the Justice Department from using any federal funds to oppose the Defense of Marriage Act in court." No, it didn't. It voted to pass through its House a bill that would, if also passed by the Senate and signed by the President, prevent the Justice Department from using any federal funds to oppose the Defense of Marriage Act. Except that might be unconstitutional. But never mind that, because the point is that all 435 Representatives, all 100 Senators, every upper-level Executive Branch officer, and everyone else who pays any serious attention to politics knows that the odds of this bill being passed by the Democratic-controlled Senate and signed into law by the Democratic President, when its entire purpose is to kneecap said Democratic President, are strictly zero. Not 0.000001%, zero. So really, sweeping away a modest amount of formal labeling that in this case functions mostly as bullshit, the House passed a non-binding resolution expressing its discontent with the notion that the Justice Department might use federal funds to oppose DOMA in court. That's all it can do, so long as it insists upon doing things that are entirely acts of spite against the other branches of the government. It needs those other branches in order to have any real power. Individual Houses of Congress rarely, and the House of Representatives almost never, have any independent constitutional standing. The House of Representatives cannot vote to do something; only Congress can do that. Until then it's basically a press release from John Boehner's office. (Or maybe Eric Cantor's office.)