Andrew Sullivan lays out Pres. Obama’s options on the debt ceiling:
It seems to me there are two options the president can take. The first is what you are told to do when a criminal or terrorist holds a gun to your head. You surrender.
The point of economic blackmail is that it works. If you have a scintilla of public responsibility and you hold public office, you cannot allow default. And so you give them everything they want. You announce this while declaring you abhor the package but have to back it for the sake of the national interest in preventing catastrophe. You detail and expose the Republican priorities far more aggressively than in the past. You blame the performance of the economy entirely on them from now on out. And you run on a platform of shared sacrifice – of revenue-enhancing tax reform and tax hikes for millionaires. Then you run against the Republicans as hard as you can.
The second option is to bypass them, invoke the 14th Amendment, and order the Treasury to keep paying its debts because an extraordinarily reckless faction wants to destroy the American economy in order to save it (and pin the subsequent double-dip recession on Obama). Bruce Bartlett outlines the mechanism here. He has some other ideas for coping here.
What you probably cannot do is negotiate with economic equivalent of terrorists. What Cantor and Boehner are doing is essentially letting the world know they have an economic WMD in their possession. And it will go off if you do not give them everything they want, with no negotiation possible. That’s the nature of today’s GOP. It needs to be destroyed before it can recover.
If I understand this the Constitution trumps any other law like the debt ceiling.
The debt ceiling raise is needed not for new spending but that that has been already authorized by Congress, ie by law and thus the President has 2 duties:
1) Uphold all laws that have been passed
2) The debt has already been committed to over many years so it is valid and “shall not be questioned.
That makes using the 14th a no brainer.
The Presidential oath also requires the President to rotect and defend
the Constitution. If he does not follow it as laid out above one could
argue you could impeach him as well.
In fact all members of Congress took a similar oath so their inaction
to provide the debt ceiling action needed to fund the laws passed by
them could be deemed a violation of their oath of office subjecting
Boehner in particular to impeachment. Right?
The other issue here is that failure to protect the nation’s financial
system from a meltdown is akin to “war” and the President again is
bound to protect the nation as well. Keeping the nation from falling
into a deeper recession, higher borrowing costs, higher deficits due to
a double dip and the world losing faith in the US as a reserve currency
makes his inaction on the 14th impeachable to me.
Failure to act has been estimated to cost the US $50B minimum directly
for even a few day default due to increased debt rollover costs and as
much as a trillion over a decade not to mention higher borrowing costs
for consumers and business as well.
The President has put forth $2T in cuts and asked for $400B in tax
loopholes being closed. Every deficit reduction plan that Reagan, Bush
I and Clinton did required a combination. Why can’t the Repubs simply
negotiate in good faith and get this done?
If they do not they will get hung out to dry by the President being
forced to act under his Constitutional duty. That surely isn’t going to
help them defeat Obama. It might just sew up his re-election before
they even have a primary.
If they think he isn’t tough enough to do this. Just remember the
Sunday nite we found about Osama or the Somali pirates that were taken
out right after he took office.
If he needs to he will act and get the job done as he should, no doubt about it.
PERRY V. UNITED STATES, 294 U. S. 330 (1935)
The government’s contention thus raises a question of far greater
importance than the particular claim of the plaintiff. On that
reasoning, if the terms of the government’s bond as to the standard of
payment can be repudiated, it inevitably follows that the obligation as
to the amount to be paid may also be repudiated. The contention
necessarily imports that the Congress can disregard the obligations of
the government at its discretion, and that, when the government borrows
money, the credit of the United States is an illusory pledge…
The Constitution gives to the Congress the power to borrow
money on the credit of the United States, an unqualified power, a power
vital to the government, upon which in an extremity its very life may
depend. The binding quality of the promise of the United States is of
the essence of the credit which is so pledged. Having this power
to authorize the issue of definite obligations for the payment of money
borrowed, the Congress has not been vested with authority to alter or
destroy those obligations.