Steve Benen summarizes the use of the 14th Amendment to obviate the debt ceiling crisis:
Circling back to our recent coverage, the 14th Amendment solution is sometimes derided as a “gimmick,” but it’s rooted in a relatively straightforward reading of the constitutional text, which states that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.”
If the validity of the debt, under constitutional mandate, can’t be questioned, then it’s not up to Congress to pass legislation — it’s up to the executive branch to simply honor the nation’s obligations.
And political consequences:
I won’t pretend to know what would happen then, but Laurence Tribe, a professor emeritus at Harvard, wrote a New York Times op-ed on the subject over the weekend, concluding, “The right question is whether Congress — after passing the spending bills that created these debts in the first place — can invoke an arbitrary dollar limit to force the president and his administration to do its bidding. There is only one right answer to that question, and it is no. And there is only one person with the power to give Congress that answer: the president of the United States.”
Finally, here’s another angle to keep in mind as the process moves forward: If this were to work out, and the 14th Amendment were to supplant the debt ceiling statute, it wouldn’t just resolve the ongoing crisis we’re facing now, it would also end all future debt ceiling standoffs going forward.
I still expect to see this when I look out the window.
Yes, there is something like institutional cognitive dissonance going on in Congress, a credible notion until one realizes that this institutional creature has a relatively short renewal time of two years, and the conservatives have become far-right extremists. The view that Congress is telling the Executive to spending too much money, without giving it permission to fulfill obligations incurred is entertaining, but something of an illusion.
But what’s catching my attention is that Benen doesn’t mention the end point of a Court-driven approach to the debt ceiling crisis: SCOTUS. What will a conservative wing, riven with scandal and, if they were honorable, embarrassment, do if faced with such a partisan issue?
Punt?
