Obama and the Debt

[boutons_deux]

THE Republicans in the House of Representatives who declare that they may refuse to raise the debt limit threaten to do more than plunge the government into default. They are proposing a blatant violation of the 14th Amendment, which states that “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law” is sacrosanct and “shall not be questioned.”

Yet the Obama administration has repeatedly suppressed any talk of invoking the Constitution in this emergency. Last Thursday Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said, “We do not believe that the 14th Amendment provides that authority to the president” to end the crisis. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew reiterated the point on Sunday and added that the president would have “no option” to prevent a default on his own.

In defense of the administration’s position, the legal scholar Laurence H. Tribe, who taught President Obama at Harvard Law School, has insisted, as he put it two years ago, that “only political courage and compromise” can avert disaster.

These assertions, however, have no basis in the history of the 14th Amendment; indeed, they distort that history, and in doing so shackle the president. In fact, that record clearly shows that Congress intended the amendment to prevent precisely the abuses that the current House Republicans blithely condone.


Congress passed the 14th Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification in June 1866. Its section on the public debt began as an effort to ensure that the government would not be liable for debts accrued by the defeated Confederacy, but also to ensure that its own debt would be honored.

That was important because conservative Northern Democrats, many of whom had sympathized with the Confederacy, were in a position to obstruct or deny repayment on the full value of the public debt by paying creditors in depreciated paper money, or “greenbacks.” This effective repudiation of obligations already accrued — to, among others, hundreds of thousands of Union pensioners and widows, as well as investors — would destroy confidence in the government and endanger the economy.

As the wording of the amendment evolved during the Congressional debate, the principle of the debt’s inviolability became a general proposition, applicable not just to the Civil War debt but to all future accrued debts of the United States. The Republican Senate leader, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, declared that by placing the debt “under the guardianship of the Constitution,” investors would be spared from being “subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress.”

Two years later, on the verge of the amendment’s ratification, its champions inside the Republican Party made their intentions absolutely clear, proclaiming in their 1868 party platform that “national honor requires the payment of the public indebtedness in the utmost good faith to all creditors at home and abroad,” and pronouncing any repudiation of the debt “a national crime.”

More than three generations later, in 1935, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, ruling in the case of Perry v. the United States, revisited the amendment and affirmed the “fundamental principle” that Congress may not “alter or destroy” debts already incurred.

House Republicans threatening to refuse to raise the debt ceiling — that is, force a repudiation of debts already accrued — would violate that “fundamental principle” of the Constitution.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/opinion/obamas-options.html?from=mostemailed

It would be hilarious if the n!gga@ finally did use the 14th Amendment, aimed originally at Confederate racists and their debts, to castrate the current Confederate racists again now.

Then the Repugs would impeach him, it would die in the Senate, where the impeachment of Clinton died.

[Th'Pusher]

I think the senate goes nuclear and changes the filibuster rules for simple majority approval before Barry invokes the 14th. As we all know, he hates the constitution. He'd wipe his ass with it if he could.

[boutons_deux]

he hates the constitution.

I agree, libertarians, truck drivers, militiamen, sovereign citizens, secessionists, tea baggers, Repugs, all know and love the Constitution more than Obama.

[Nbadan]

I agree, libertarians, truck drivers, militiamen, sovereign citizens, secessionists, tea baggers, Repugs, all know and love the Constitution more the Obama.

:lol

He hates the Constitution

:rolleyes

[Th'Pusher]

Make no mistake: Although the United States may well be headed for a catastrophic economic crisis, we are already in a monumental political and constitutional crisis. As a historical matter, were the House Republicans to push the country into the abyss, they would be creating a situation analogous in the past only to the nullification crisis of 1832 and the secession crisis of 1860-1. The emergency is that grave.
So what should President Obama do? First, he must make the self-evident case that if the Republicans go through with their threat to take the country over the fiscal cliff, they will have violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution that states: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” Explaining that the Republicans propose to act unconstitutionally would immensely strengthen his position in this emergency no matter what. He needs to make the argument loudly and clearly, without the lawyerly diffidence he has displayed.


The burden in this crisis rests entirely with the congressional Republicans who have precipitated it. If they were to violate the Constitution, it would be their fault, not the president’s. The president needs to make that argument as well – crisply and loudly.


On Oct. 8, the New York Times published my op-ed arguing for the president to declare that the Republicans would be violating the Constitution, specifically the 14th Amendment, if they refused to approve the debt limit bill, and that their abdication would demand that the president exercise his emergency power to end the crisis.


That same day, President Obama was questioned in a news conference about these points. He rejected using the 14th Amendment in any way because expert opinion is divided about it. “If you start having a situation in which there’s legal controversy about the U.S. Treasury’s authority to issue debt, the damage will have been done even if that were constitutional, because people wouldn’t be sure,” Obama said. “It’d be tied up in litigation for a long time. That’s going to make people nervous. There’s no magic bullet here.”


His statement presumes a consensus among legal scholars that will never occur. They are as polarized as the country. Surely the president encountered the conservative ideologues of the Federalist Society when he was editor of the Harvard Law Review. By failing to make the case that the Republicans would be more than irresponsible but indeed unconstitutional, he deprives himself of his strongest argument and his only means of preventing a national disaster. He also does his own disservice to the Constitution that he is sworn to preserve, protect, and defend.


In the event that the House Republicans were to act unconstitutionally and to put the country in an unprecedented catastrophic situation, the president is not a potted plant. To say otherwise is mere legal pettifoggery. Nor should it be assumed that the Constitution is a static document that prevents any remedy in the event of emergency. The tradition of standing on presidential power goes back to President Thomas Jefferson. That tradition holds that the Constitution is not, as Associate Justice Robert Jackson once observed, “a suicide pact.”


“A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen,” Jefferson wrote in 1810, “but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.” (Jefferson’s emphasis.)


Jefferson was hardly alone. Presidents Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln believed that the Constitution provided power to the executive in a national crisis to save the Union. Before the Civil War, President James Buchanan argued at great length to the contrary. Those who say that President Obama is prevented from doing anything echo Buchanan’s arguments for passivity. They are upholding the long-disgraced Buchanan tradition. These are Buchanan’s words, stated soon after South Carolina seceded in 1860:


“Apart from the execution of the laws, so far as this may be practicable, the Executive has no authority to decide what shall be the relations between the Federal Government and South Carolina. He has been invested with no such discretion. He possesses no power to change the relations heretofore existing between them, much less to acknowledge the independence of that State. This would be to invest a mere executive officer with the power of recognizing the dissolution of the confederacy among our thirty-three sovereign States.”


Lincoln thought differently.
If the Republicans decide not the raise the debt ceiling, the solution to the political and constitutional crisis is clear. By his constitutionally dictated oath of office, the president is required to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. By defaulting on America’s public debt, the Republicans will have attacked the Constitution, giving the president no choice. If he fails to act by invoking emergency powers, based on his constitutional oath of office, and raise the debt ceiling, he will have violated that oath.


Claims by our modern-day James Buchanans that bonds issued as a result of such executive action would be shrouded in uncertainty and therefore worthless are pure speculation, based not in fact but on mere projections. The law professors and pundits who have claimed as much are in no position to know. They have not, for example, consulted the finance ministries of China, Japan, or Germany on whether they wish to accede to the collapse of the world economy. Their conjecture is not, in any event, either a legal or historical judgment.


Still others in the Buchanan tradition contend that there are no enumerated powers in the Constitution for the president to act in such a national emergency. This is precisely the position Buchanan articulated:
“The question fairly stated is, has the Constitution delegated to Congress the power to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw or has actually withdrawn from the Confederacy? …After much serious reflection I have arrived at the conclusion that no such power has been delegated to Congress or to any other department of the Federal Government. It is manifest upon an inspection of the Constitution that this is not among the specific and enumerated powers granted to Congress, and it is equally apparent that its exercise is not ‘necessary and proper for carrying into execution’ any one of these powers.”


Lincoln rejected this line of passive thought. The ultimate provision in the Constitution that provides for presidential action is the oath of office itself, enumerated in the Constitution. If the current Congress willfully violates the Constitution, an act of unarmed rebellion and insurrection, it will create a vacuum that must be filled by executive action to prevent the nation’s ruin. With Congress’s abdication, its rebellion against the Constitution, the president could theoretically also invoke another constitutional provision. Obama, for wholly political reasons, should not raise it. Nonetheless, it is there, and it should be publicly discussed. That provision stipulates that the president must act to suppress insurrection. It is in the Constitution as clear as a bell. Lincoln in fact had arrested the elected members of the state legislature of Maryland on these grounds.


Those who criticized Jackson and Lincoln accused them of being merely political and denounced them as tyrants. But Jackson and Lincoln felt compelled by necessity and their oath of office to preserve the nation. Lincoln kept Jackson’s Proclamation on Nullification on his desk throughout the secession crisis. Perhaps Obama, a Lincoln acolyte, might read the words his predecessor used as his blueprint. If he wishes to go down in history as a Lincoln and not a Buchanan, Obama owes the nation and the Constitution nothing less.
Sean Wilentz is professor of history at Princeton University.




Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/obamas-constitutional-imperative-98069.html#ixzz2hHdeO8P7 (http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/obamas-constitutional-imperative-98069.html#ixzz2hHdeO8P7)


I could see the republicans forcing us to default on the debt then impeaching him for defaulting on the debt :lol