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
“You are absolutely right, there are no major conservative/libertarian thinkers at all, except for…”
“It” might go back to what I wrote and read it again, because I said the opposite of what “it” thinks. There are many on the Right who represent an intellectual elite, which had you been able to read with comprehension you would have gathered. Instead “it” proved my point. Ah, but I’m guilty myself of having fed this particular “it” with a response, I’ll refrain from that in the future.
“Only one problem though, the intellectual elites on the left have held sway over the country for close to 100 years.”
Roco,
I have no doubt you believe that to be true. Since it is your perception and your mythology, you could do no less. A closed mind is a sad thing, but on some small occasions you have shown brief flashes of humanity, so you are not altogether someone to be disliked. The problem with your inability to see beyond your own pre-judgments, is that your solutions to problems remain predictable and definitely limned by your ideology. Those so disposed on the Left and on the Right have kept this country in a stasis that is rushing towards entropy. Sadly, those on both ends of the political spectrum, see the other as evil.
Unable to comprehend unfettered thought, fear of the “evil other” overcomes reason and stereotypical behavior is the result. Meanwhile, the Corporatists ruled the last century for 80 years and have prospered for 11 in the current century. That you believe this not to be true is the symptom of your mind being fogged by the mythology of ideology. I pity your loss of the ability to think in an unconstrained manner, since you are not stupid and also probably a nice person.
Bias doesn’t trump being biased either, kderosa, nor does selectively presenting or distorting the facts in favor of a bias which is what you just did. As to your definition of ad hominem, please feel free to ignore that it is a valid argument to impeach the character of a witness just as it is a valid argument to impeach the quality of evidence. Impeachment of witnesses and evidence happens in courts across this country every day. If you don’t want your informational sources criticized, pick better sources that the Heritage Foundation and their cohorts the Koch Brothers. I’d also suggest you fully consider the implications of data before you link to it in the future.
@Roco
I think you are right. My addled-Hippie-brain translator is on the fritz.
kderosa:
I think he was accusing me of what I was accusing him of. I think he thinks the intellectual elites on the right are as full of sh…. as the intellectual elites on the left.
Only one problem though, the intellectual elites on the left have held sway over the country for close to 100 years.
So we actually have a track record of failure to point to.
Mike Spindell:
Somethings work and somethings dont. I like to hang my hat on what actually works.
I like some of what Rand has to say but dont think she has all the answers. You spend way too much time worrying about characters in a book. Get out more Mike, it will do you good.
@Mike Spindell
You are absolutely right, there are no major conservative/libertarian thinkers at all, except for
Thomas Hobbes
John Locke
David Hume
Adam Smith
Edmund Burke
Alexis de Tocqueville
Herbert Spencer
Ludwig von Mises
Joseph A. Schumpeter
F. A. Hayek
Michael Oakeshott
Karl Popper
Ayn Rand
Milton Friedman
Thomas sowell
Russell Kirk
James M. Buchanan
Murray Rothbard
Robert Nozick
Nope, none at all.
@TonyC
I’m still waiting for you to cite an example of a country with high taxation that is in better economic shape than the completely unregulated and non-taxed U.S.
Also, while you are at it explain to me what happens under your confiscatory tax scheme if I want to disinvest in a failing company and shift resources to a new entity (say by selling stock in one and buying it in another). Under your scheme it appears that I will forfeit most of that capital to the government. You really can’t have capitalism without capital. This is also a good example of how high taxes causes misallocation of capital and resources. Remember those giant conglomerates we used to have in the 70s and 80s; they were a result of companies buying up other companies to avoid high tax rates. It was an inefficient mess.
“What is it with these people? Do they really not understand or are they complicit in the web of deceit perpetrated by the intellectual elites on the left?”
Roco,
Two mis-assumptions:
1. That you yourself are not entwined in a web of deceit of your own choosing, since you feel you have all the answers.
2. That there are no intellectual elites on the right. What do you think Ayn Rand was talking about. Rourke, Galt and Deneskjold were all intellectual elitists and Dagny T. had pretensions.
We all tend to demonize those who we disagree with and some of us are known by the company we keep. I’m in good company here with people smarter than me. A person learns from those with a greater fund of information. A wise person, which I am doesn’t envy others talents, but embraces them. At least on this blog I think the choices I’ve made in who to associate with, are better than yours. However, choice is what capitalism is all about isn’t it and the right to make bad choices is guaranteed to you and by you.
GeneH
You just love them ad hominems.
Here’s a nice liberal centrist that explains why your attacking of the source is without merit:
Bias doesn’t trump facts. If a biased individual makes a factually correct statement, his or her bias does not make the statement factually incorrect. It’s important to look at the statements presented on their own merits. It’s entirely possible that bias did influence the statement. Someone could have cherry-picked facts, skewed data, or even just be flat-out lying. But those are all critiques of the statement, not the person. To avoid this fallacy, look at the points presented — even when it’s a source you dislike — and concede or critique those points themselves.
Gene Red Herring H:
So good of you to drop in and start dissembling.
kderosa:
you never cease to amaze.
Good posting on the CFR, I have brought that up numerous times in response to their contention the federal regulatory burden is diminishing.
What is it with these people? Do they really not understand or are they complicit in the web of deceit perpetrated by the intellectual elites on the left?
Research from the Heritage Organization isn’t worth the neoconservative paper it is printed on given there relationship with the Koch Foundation Associate Program and it only equaled in lack of utility by data taken out of context and misapplied. If one looks at the data provided in the SBA report, the cost of regulation per employee goes down substantially as the business grows larger. This only goes to illustrate that larger business are using their lobbying pull to suppress competition from the bottom up. The use of unequal laws and enforcement by big business against small business is indeed a problem, but it is a problem with the anti-competitive practices of big business and their use of graft in the form of campaign finance to unduly influence government for a two-fold effect; 1) cost avoidance by their avoidance of equal application of regulation and 2) the suppression of others from entering into the market to provide competition for them. The evidence you point to does indeed point to a problem, just not the one you think it does. It points squarely at the problem of the corporatists’ undue influence over government in creating a situation that results in violations of the Equal Protection Clause so that their company’s can benefit from what is in effect a subsidy combined with an anti-competitive practice. The job of the government in regulating industry is to protect consumers and employees from predatory and unsafe practices and to ensure that there is a level playing field. What you pointed to is that the playing field is no longer level. There is only one reason for that too: campaign finance and corporate influence over politicians who are violating the terms of their office in servicing corporate desires instead of the good of the people. In seeking to serve special interests, you have only succeeded in pointing out that special interests are part of the problem.
You’d think it’d be hard to find fault in a cut and paste job from Wikipedia, but Mesporon made the mistake of trying to insert his feeble independent thought into his hastily assembled “facts.” Nothwithstanding, all the unsupported opinion, the primary problem in Mesporon’s jeremiad is the meme that regulations are good and that Bush was such the deregulator whose deregulating antics caused problems in the economy. This silly meme runs head long into the facts.
Since 2001, the annual regulatory cost of federal regulation has increased by nearly $30 billion. Over $11 billion was added in FY 2007 alone.
By contrast, actions to lessen regulatory burdens have been rare. In FY 2007, savings from significant actions reducing regulation totaled some $684 million, or about 1/17th of the cost of new burdens imposed that year.
According to an analysis by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and Washington University’s Weidenbaum Center, appropriations for federal regulatory agencies have increased during the Bush years from $27 billion in FY 2001 to $44.9 billion in FY 2007-a 44 percent increase in inflation-adjusted dollars. The total staffing of regulatory agencies went up nearly as much, from 172,000 employees to over 244,000- a 41 percent increase.
To a significant degree, these increases are due to the federal takeover of airport screening operations by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). But even with the TSA excluded, the increases were still sizeable, with regulatory budgets still increasing by 30 percent and non-TSA staff levels rising almost 11 percent.
Unlike the Federal Register, which is in effect a posting board for all sorts of agency actions, the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) is the regulatory equivalent of a statute book that includes only the text of existing regulations. In number of pages, the CFR makes the Federal Register look Lilliputian, with the 2007 edition totaling 145,816 pages, more than 4,500 pages longer than in 2001, when Bush took office, and almost 8,000 pages longer than in 2000.
Although the Bush Administration imposed fewer new burdens on Americans, the total regulatory burden continued to increase in absolute terms. Compared to the 74 rule changes that increased regulatory costs, only 23 rule changes reduced burdens. In other words, for every case in which regulators reduced a burden, they increased burdens over three times.
Interestingly, independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which are not under the President’s direct control and are not subject to White House regulatory review procedures, have accounted for more than half of all deregulatory actions.
(Source)
In the face of higher costs of federal regulations, the research shows that small businesses continue to bear a disproportionate share of the federal regulatory burden. The findings are consistent with those in Hopkins (1995) and Crain and Hopkins (2001). The research finds that the cost of federal regulations totals $1.1 trillion; the cost per employee for firms with fewer than 20 employees is $7,647. (Source)
Also, if regulations cause prosperity shouldn’t Obama’s massive new influx of regulations have served to regulate us out of this Great Recession. (The burden of regulation on Americans increased at an alarming rate in fiscal year 2010. Based on data from the Government Accountability Office, an unprecedented 43 major new regulations were imposed by Washington. And based on reports from government regulators themselves, the total cost of these rules topped $26.5 billion, far more than any other year for which records are available.)
That Bush was such a deregulator.
The problem with having an empty head and being intellectually lazy like Mesporon is that a meme (like regulations went down during the Bush admin) can get lodged in that big empty head where it can bump around causing all sorts of intellectual problems without the owner of said big empty head questioning the accuracy of the meme. Then the meme gets jumbled into a barely coherent argument filled with all kinds of unsupported opinion (“the good old days of the 1950′s when regulation was at a low ebb and tax rates were low,” “The economy has slowed and it has taken government spending to keep the economy going at any pace,” “[Economies] are structures composed of some individuals, a money supply, taxation rates, amalgams of capital in the form of funds, trusts, and corporations including banks, partnerships, and land holding interests all with both competing and compl[e]mentary interests as they go about the process of investing labor and capital to derive profits,” “the fact is people with high IQs should be running the world’s biggest economy. In fact they should be running anything their intellectual merit justifies, “)
A mind is such a terrible thing to waste.
kderosa:
you on Vacation? Or just had enough of invincible ignorance?
OS:
I disagree, money invested by venture capitalists is nothing but seed corn. It is exactly the same. If I risk $100,000 on a start-up I may get lucky and have 10,000 shares in the next MicroSoft or 5 Guys Hamburgers. But I could just as easily invest in Mespo’s 5 and 10 and lose my entire $100,000. Or I could invest in Tony C’s Flexible Jelly Bean and make $100 but still have my principle intact but still working at sub-standard returns.
I would like to see your math, it might be interesting. Rafflaw doesnt have to read it and this is a fairly old thread.
RE: seed corn.
Everyone knows that any analogy, carried far enough, will break down. Some analogies break down right out of the box because they are not appropriate for the example intended. The Seed Corn analogy, while interesting, fails because it is based on a false premise. The premise is the False Equivalence Fallacy. Seeds are finite and not all germinate. If you start with 100 seeds, you know that it is impossible to get 110 plants from them. Money is flexible, can be invested and grown even if some is taken from the kitty. If we use the mathematics of the syllogism, we can present mathematical proof of why it breaks down, but rafflaw gave me a hard time a while back when I laid a bunch of math here so I won’t go there. 😆
Mespo:
The 50’s had a tax rate of 90% for the incomes over $400,000. I leave it to you to do the work on finding out what the others were. But if I remember correctly people making $30,000 in 1950’s paid about 20% of their income in taxes. The average salary was around $5,000/year and they paid very little.
Kennedy reduced taxes and look what happened.
The Clinton years were the result in the change to the economy brought about by the Internet and all of the many new products and services necessary for that technology to come into being. It was pretty much left alone to grow and grow it did. That the end of the decade of the 90’s ended in a downturn is no surprise, it is called the business cycle and it is a natural component of a healthy economy. Trying to flatten out peaks and troughs is not natural.
You mention many different investment constructs in your post, all at some point are owned by individuals.
The last time I looked economies don’t make laws, they must operate under laws made by politicians. To be free a people must have both economic and political freedom. To be able to vote means nothing if you are forced to buy government health care or an electric car.
As an after thought the technological revolution, was probably in part, due to the structural changes made to the tax code during the Reagan years, capital actually had a chance to be used in a proper manner.
Capital is nothing more than seed corn. You cannot take a farmers seed corn and expect his harvest to be as large as it might have been. The farmer still needs to eat and put aside corn for the next year. And what if there is a bad drought and the farmer needs to use some of his seed corn to live? Then what happens if he has had some of that seed corn taken? The next harvest is going to be small indeed.
Only that you lie and deflect because you cannot refute my logic, which you still refuse to do. Why? Because you will lose, just like your ridiculous rejection of unidirectional correlation SUGGESTING causation. You purposely go off in the weeds and refuse to answer the most basic questions, because you know you will lose, and I shall take that as your unwilling concession. You act like a twelve year old that refuses to make any move at all in chess when they cannot see a move that doesn’t lead to checkmate. They will quit and then deny losing, because they think quitting is different than losing. It is not, quitting is concession. I’d say, “Well fought,” but of course it wasn’t, because you are an insecure coward, you cannot win the logical argument so instead you will continue to nitpick on bullshit that has nothing to do with the logical argument. You quit the real arguments, and that is conceding the points whether you like it or not.
Feel free to proceed with your denials.
@Tony, as the link I provided shows, swedish earners have given up. They are significantly poorer than the us and even farther behind states like minnesota which is more demographically similar. Did you have another point to make re Sweden?