Democratic members have raised a novel argument under the Fourteenth Amendment that the refusal to raise the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. For full disclosure, I was asked about this argument weeks ago by members who believe that forcing the country to default would be not just catastrophic but unconstitutional. I will be discussing this topic today on CNN and tonight on Countdown.
The relevant language of the Fourteenth Amendment states:
The argument goes that Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment declares:
“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. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.”
The argument goes that, by not lifting the debt limit, Congress is “questioning” “the validity of the public debt of the United States.” Under this logic, advocates are encouraging President Obama to simply pay the debts in accordance with the Constitution. That would be an extreme step that would add a constitutional crisis to an economic crisis.
The “authorized by law” clause could present an interesting debate since the debt ceiling is part of a federal statute — though conversely so is the obligation to pay things like social security.
The language is certainly written in absolute terms but it is not likely that a court would rule that it makes a failure to lift the debt ceiling unconstitutional. Congress can argue that it fully intends to pay its debts, but that there is a political dispute over how and when. They can argue that they were not challenging the “validity” of the debt but the priority in the payment. The United States will still be fully liable for the debt and the interest.
Of course, as with the Libyan War, the Administration could trigger the constitutional fight on the belief that no one will be able to get standing to challenge its payment of the debt.
Jonathan Turley
@mespo
You keep pointing out my typos and minor mistakes, and I’ll be content pointing out all your major mistakes and misunderstandings every time you try to make a substantive point that isn’t a copy and pasted quote.
kderosa:
“But I think it is you who is missing Addams’ point. People are not angels, they need to be governed by a government. ”
****************
Not to interrupt your little diatribe with a word of accuracy, but that would be James Madison’s point in Federalist 51. Tony C even gave you a hiint. Yeesh!
Maybe you could comment later about another monumental line from American History–John Paul Jones’ famous “Give me liberty or give me death!” LOL
Keep talking man. Norm Crosby has nothing on you!
Let me also be shrill on another point: Just because somebody chooses to submit to something does not justify the act to which they are submitting.
Everybody always has a choice: They can choose to die first. If I choose to hand my wallet to a mugger rather than be shot to death, that does not justify mugging. If I put up with employer abuse, shorting my pay, giving me insane hours, and endangering my health because
a) I need a paycheck,
b) Any other employer is likely to be equally abusive,
c) My supposed “choice” if I quit is losing my house, my family’s insurance, and endangering the nutrition and education of my kids,
then my “choice” does not justify employer abuse. If people clamor for jobs that might kill them, chances are they are doing that because their alternative “choice” is death or destitution. If people are hired, somebody is earning a profit, and earning a profit by giving a person a choice between death and abuse is the moral equivalent of slavery. That is why it has to be outlawed, because the sociopaths will not hesitate to make that the condition: If you look at places in the world today that do let employers beat, starve, and fatally endanger their employees, this is precisely what you will see: They DO beat, starve and kill a few employees in the name of profit, and the employees still clamor to take the jobs because their “choice,” ALSO engineered by sociopaths, is starvation.
@kderosa: If sociopaths CAN, they will just take what they want; that is how England came to be, how Hussein’s Iraq came to be, how Saudi Arabia came to be.
As for being forced to buy their products: Let me refer you to the modern health insurance debate: You ARE going to be forced to buy the products of sociopaths.
As for other products, people actually ARE forced to buy *something* for food, for shelter, for transportation, for health. People ARE forced to work for some kind of income; and if the only people to buy from, and work for, are sociopaths, they will buy from them and work for them.
You seem clueless when it comes to the real world. Do you think people will starve their children by refusing to work for an employer that beats them, when *all* the employers will beat them? Think again. Do you think food producers will sanitize their food when *nobody* sanitizes their food? Think again. We’ve been down this minimal-regulation road in this country and in other countries, it doesn’t work, and it sucks so bad that people band together and create laws against it. The free market on these points is proven already, it will not correct itself. Businessmen, at least *some* of them, will endanger the health and lives of customers and employees and the community, and if they can hide the fact that they are doing that, they will hide it to avoid responsibility and retribution.
I don’t care if you think that is shrill, reality is shrill, and you live in a fantasy world.
puzzling:
“QFT”
yes it is and our founders had a tool for restraining the power lust of bad men. but these progressive types have wounded the tool almost to the point of ineffectiveness.
QFT
@TonyC — you’re starting to get shrill. Or perhaps it’s just the bold.
Those kind of workplace and food safety regulations aren’t the social safety net.
People were actually demanding these jobs despite these horrid conditions. At the time, employers could not have forced any person to come work for them. I’ve pointed that out.
Also, I don’t think all that food safety regulation and inspection works as well as you think it does.
Sociopaths can’t just do whatever they want to. No one is forced to buy their products. And if you get enough people sick or injured, word will get out, and business will suffer.
I’m not sure what you are referring to here.
here is a good place to start investigating what fascism is:
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/haken32.htm
@kderosa: And STILL missing the point. The social safety net, as Buddha has documented in this very thread and you continue to ignore, was demanded by the people in response to sociopathic business practices, including beating children into working 14 hours a day, including allowing poisons and carcinogens and disease-causing agents into mass-produced foods, including all of that stuff. Without regulation, sociopaths do whatever they can get away with, and that turns out to be plenty of misery to go around for everyone.
The social safety net was a RESPONSE to the economy being overrun by sociopaths. We didn’t “open the door” to sociopaths, after the Great Depression they caused we rebelled against them and locked them out for a few decades, and then they found themselves another way in: If Democracy was the problem (and it was) then corner the market on Democracy, by jingo. And they have. Now they own the Congress, they apparently own the President, and soon they will dismantle that social safety net and return in force to their sociopathic ways.
“I invite readers to investigate for themselves who has the better grasp of what constitutes fascism.”
Amen to that.
@TonyC, you can’t keep the sociopaths out of government, we live in a democracy and sociopaths can be elected in like anyone else. All you can do, is limit the power they have upon being elected to government and limit their ability to expand their power once in office. That is the control itself part which is so difficult.
@TonyC,
We tried delegating limited power via the Constitution. And it took some times, but then some well-meaning lefties broke the Constitution via the Commerce Clause, to gain their social safety net.
They honestly think the Feds can do almost whatever they want now. Take a look.
These aren’t sociopaths. But to get what they wanted, they opened the door to sociopaths.
@kderosa: You are still missing the point. Of course. It is entirely possible to have a police force that answers to the people; it is also possible to have a social safety net that does not give the government unlimited power. It is possible to delegate LIMITED power.
As I said before, and will probably have to say again because you refuse to acknowledge the REAL point, the problem isn’t delegating power to a government, the problem is keeping the sociopaths out of government and using that power for personal gain. If you think the problem with government is overreach, who do you think is doing the overreaching, and WHY?
The answer is sociopaths and the power-hungry and those that would use government, or their government office, for self-gratification, self-aggrandizement, their own egomania, and in general for something besides the public service of doing what the public has assigned them to do.
The problem is keeping those people OUT of government, if we could solve that problem, we would have a Democracy. Madison (the author of Federalist 51) was too late, checks and balances do not work when there is enough corruption money to buy EVERY OFFICE. When the government and courts consist of a majority of people that are put in place by wealthy sociopaths, they will enact the policies written by the wealthy sociopaths. That is what Madison and the other founding fathers failed to anticipate: The sociopath problem.
It doesn’t take a lot of poison to kill a body, and sociopaths are the poison in the system. Failing to exclude them is what causes the ills you observe, not liberalism, not conservatism, not taxes, and not the courts. They will find a way to corrupt ANY system that doesn’t explicitly take action to protect itself from their corrosive actions. Our system is corrupted in precisely that way; there is no longer any distinction between politicians that claim to be Democrats or Republicans. They are both servants of the people that want no rules (or taxes) to apply to them and lots of rules (and taxes) to apply to everybody else.
Hey! It’s the kdetroll theme song! Everybody dance!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hkC8jOqH4E
You getting paid by the word now, Mr. Makes Up Terms and Don’t Know History?
The proof is in the eating of the pudding. I invite readers to investigate for themselves who has the better grasp of what constitutes fascism. It won’t take much investigation on their part and they’ll start dancing with James Brown every time they see one of your posts.
kderosa:
those political favors are going to the Latino community now. And blacks are being left at the alter after being promised the moon by their democrat suitors.
If I were black, I would keep a silver cross, garlic, silver bullet and a stake on hand to ward off any democrat wanting to give me a hand up er hand out. I could not think of a more potent device to destroy a race than the war on poverty.
I think blacks are finally understanding free markets and not government hand outs are a path to wealth and an impediment to racism.
The great intellectuals Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams know this, they should be required reading for every school child above the age of 16 in the United States. And in particular Knowledge and Decision should be required reading as a senior in high school or as a college freshman.
Great men both and we dont hear enough from them. Truly both are American treasures. I hope the next American president presents them with the medal of freedom before they pass on.
“I forgot to add: That’s also the reason why most African-Americans continue to vote Republican in national elections out of their admiration for the far right’s unwaivering support during the 1960′s!”
Or because the democrats are all too willing to hand them out political favors based on identity politics in exchange for their vote. You’d have to be a fool to turn that deal down. Or at least a fool that doesn’t see the bigger picture and long term.
In the 26 major civil rights votes after 1933, a majority of Democrats opposed civil rights legislation in over 80 percent of the votes. By contrast, the Republican majority favored civil rights in over 96 percent of the votes.
Remember that the Republicans were the minority party at the time. Nonetheless, H.R.7152 passed the House on Feb. 10, 1964. Of the 420 members who voted, 290 supported the civil rights bill and 130 opposed it.
Republicans favored the bill 138 to 34; Democrats supported it 152-96. Republicans supported it in higher proportions than Democrats. Even though those Democrats were Southern segregationists, without Republicans the bill would have failed. Republicans were the other much-needed leg of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Get your facts straight, kniucklehead.
TonyC — Look, the Federalists won the debate, the Antif-ederalists lost, but most of their predictions have come true because the federal government had not been sufficiently constrained. I’m not even sure it is possible to constrain government. Power always finds a way.
But I think it is you who is missing Addams’ point. People are not angels, they need to be governed by a government. But Government is only a collection of men itself and as a result government must also control itself. And the federal government has not been able to control itelf becasue it was not sufficiently constrained back duringthe founding, even though at the time it was the most constrained government in existence. Power finds a way, it is true.
But the powerful are increasing their power through the government itself because we have allowed government to ain power in order to cure perceived social and economic ills. A government that has the power to give you everything you want, has the power to take away everything from you as well. This is the part of the equation that you and others here do not seem to grasp. You love your social programs and government entitlements, but you hate what government has doenwith all the power needed to effect these programs. You can’t have it both ways.
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. You are all to happy to relinquish your freedoms for your social safety net, but then want to complain when bad people abuse the power given to government to put that safety net in place.
I forgot to add: That’s also the reason why most African-Americans continue to vote Republican in national elections out of their admiration for the far right’s unwaivering support during the 1960’s!
“The far right in America did not support segregation. The Southern Democrats supported degregation.”
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Yeah, those progressive bastards! I like the ones with dogs, badges, and fire-hoses. They were very liberal guys. Touchy, feely, and soft. Hey, they really were. Just look: