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
Tony C:
you suffer from the delusion that religion and philosophy are 2 different things.
“Since religion is a primitive form of philosophy—an attempt to offer a comprehensive view of reality—many of its myths are distorted, dramatized allegories based on some element of truth, some actual, if profoundly elusive, aspect of man’s existence.”
Are you ever right?
What is silly as shit is what you have been spouting on this thread. Once a Marxist always a Marxist. But the sad thing is you haven’t figured out you are a collectivist.
@Roco: You don’t have to recite your religious texts to me, I don’t believe any of that shit, and none of it is supported by experiment or fact. It is all speculation, and silly as shit speculation at that.
@KD: Your motivations are your own, but a billion dollars worth of factories is still a billion dollar material asset you own, just as Buffett’s billions have really been shares in businesses all along, they are material assets, not cash assets. The same goes for Gates and others; they are “worth billions” but not in CASH, they own stock that is worth billions at its current market value, and of course those billions cannot be readily realized because if they tried to sell all they own they would crash the market value pretty damn quick. Supply and demand, remember?
Gates and Buffett and many other billionaires do what they do because they love running their business and realizing a vision; those guys live on typically much less than 1% of their annualized increase in net worth.
I don’t know what motivates them; I would guess it is a love of making the deals, or a vision of their place in history, or the power to make things happen as they want. Perhaps it is more complex than that; but for many billionaires their motivation is clearly not about money, like Soros and Gates and Buffett, they are giving the money away, living on a tiny fraction of their income, and still working like dogs decades after a money-motivated person would have bought a big island and retired.
Tony C:
“Only on the basis of individual rights can any good—private or public—be defined and achieved. Only when each man is free to exist for his own sake—neither sacrificing others to himself nor being sacrificed to others—only then is every man free to work for the greatest good he can achieve for himself by his own choice and by his own effort. And the sum total of such individual efforts is the only kind of general, social good possible.”
Tony C:
“The tribal notion of “the common good” has served as the moral justification of most social systems—and of all tyrannies—in history. The degree of a society’s enslavement or freedom corresponded to the degree to which that tribal slogan was invoked or ignored.
“The common good” (or “the public interest”) is an undefined and undefinable concept: there is no such entity as “the tribe” or “the public”; the tribe (or the public or society) is only a number of individual men. Nothing can be good for the tribe as such; “good” and “value” pertain only to a living organism—to an individual living organism—not to a disembodied aggregate of relationships.
“The common good” is a meaningless concept, unless taken literally, in which case its only possible meaning is: the sum of the good of all the individual men involved. But in that case, the concept is meaningless as a moral criterion: it leaves open the question of what is the good of individual men and how does one determine it?
It is not, however, in its literal meaning that that concept is generally used. It is accepted precisely for its elastic, undefinable, mystical character which serves, not as a moral guide, but as an escape from morality. Since the good is not applicable to the disembodied, it becomes a moral blank check for those who attempt to embody it.
When “the common good” of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals. It is tacitly assumed, in such cases, that “the common good” means “the good of the majority” as against the minority or the individual. Observe the significant fact that that assumption is tacit: even the most collectivized mentalities seem to sense the impossibility of justifying it morally. But “the good of the majority,” too, is only a pretense and a delusion: since, in fact, the violation of an individual’s rights means the abrogation of all rights, it delivers the helpless majority into the power of any gang that proclaims itself to be “the voice of society” and proceeds to rule by means of physical force, until deposed by another gang employing the same means.
If one begins by defining the good of individual men, one will accept as proper only a society in which that good is achieved and achievable. But if one begins by accepting “the common good” as an axiom and regarding individual good as its possible but not necessary consequence (not necessary in any particular case), one ends up with such a gruesome absurdity as Soviet Russia, a country professedly dedicated to “the common good,” where, with the exception of a minuscule clique of rulers, the entire population has existed in subhuman misery for over two generations.”
Tony C:
“Future taxpayers will do the same for me, I hope, just as I now expect my taxes to be invested in the future of children that I may never see grow up, because it is the fair thing to do after what others did for me.”
No, you and yours have assured the next generation that their seed corn will be the property of the mice and there will be no growth in the crop or even a reduction. A few bad years of drought and your crop is not as large as it could have been. The mice are multiplying and taking more every year. Pretty soon you will starve and then the mice will starve or move on.
You are starving future generations by your actions. Why do you hate humanity so much?
You mean all individual taxpayers, actually you mean just some individual taxpayers. Also, government doesn’t invest, it isn’t allowed to, it only spends. There is no society, only individual taxpayers.
Tony C:
I have news for you, you are buying things with your seed corn [to put it into simple concepts]. If you are losing seed corn to the mice, you dont eat it you protect it for next year. If the mice get their share you have less to plant the following season. And if you eat it to protect it from the mice, you also have less corn to plant next year.
Either way your crop will be smaller because you planted less corn. Whether you eat it of the mice get it.
This economics stuff isnt hard, at the core it is pretty straightforward.
No, individual taxpayers did NOT pay for those benefits. All taxpayers paid for those benefits collectively, as an investment in a child that many of them never lived to see grow up. But I have done my own share to repay their investment, to fund their retirement and advanced age health costs, to keep their roads and police force in working order long after they have stopped earning, to keep their food safe and their contracts honored well past their mental capacity to do it for themselves.
Future taxpayers will do the same for me, I hope, just as I now expect my taxes to be invested in the future of children that I may never see grow up, because it is the fair thing to do after what others did for me.
so if I can’t draw income without being it taxed away and if i’ve already invested in the optimal amount why not buy a corporate jet, refurnish my office, and take it easy instead of working my ass off trying to eke out a profit by growing the business and investing in new stuff if i’ll never see it.
@KD: I know what I need to know, and that is that you are wrong.
“My” system doesn’t encourage businesses to “run up” expenses in any way; if by “run up” you mean engage in wasteful spending. Even with a 75% tax, throwing away $100 instead of paying the tax on it and keeping $25 makes no sense. Are you purposely stupid, or just naturally stupid?
What it encourages businesses to do is invest profits in creating new business or in expansion of existing businesses, that investment does not mean buying stock in a public company (which is not an “investment” at all, really), it means engaging in legitimate business expenses like buying new equipment, hiring consultants, developing advertising, hiring new employees, renting new outlets, building new factories, buying airtime to promote their products to a wider audience, buying materials to manufacture their new products, and so on. All of those are business expenses directly deductible from GROSS income in the process of calculating NET income, which is the only taxable part. That means those expenses are 100% tax free. Zero tax.
Higher taxes on NET income encourages investment, not waste. The difference is that investment means there is some expectation that the expense will enable higher profits in the future; waste does not carry any such expectation. Do not conflate them, they are not synonymous.
individual taxpayers, not society, paid for much of those benefits, TonyC. Also, you might have been educated at no cost, but it certainly wasn’t free.
@Roco: I did not enter society from a state of nature, I entered society in a American hospital. American society protected me from burning to death in a firetrap house, it protected me from lead in my formula, it protected my caregivers with police that kept criminals at least partly in check, it educated me for essentially nothing, it paid for my college degrees, it protected my contracts, it prosecuted those that stole from me.
I am not so stupidly self-centered as to believe I made myself from whole cloth without the help of society; without it I’d be dead or still hunting and gathering. Most likely dead, looking back at the history of anarchy.
I consider American society a partner in the business of my life. That doesn’t mean I love everything about it, but I certainly respect the fact that it has done a fair share of the work so far.
@tonyc, so you admit that your system encourages business to run up expenses. That seems efficient and consumer friendly. And right you are about taxes, once the stock has been sold it is a recognized gain which doesn’t fall into the like kind exception. You should have read down further.
@KD: “They haven’t sold their stock.”
A VC doesn’t have to sell his stock, either. Although selling stock does generate excess revenue, that revenue can be reduced by spending money on legitimate business expenses, which are deductible.
From your own link: “Recognized gains must be included in gross income. Recognized losses are deductible from gross income.”
You know what else the IRS recognizes as deductible from gross income? Business expenses incurred in the same year as the gross income was realized. Which, as I have alluded to before, tax attorneys can engineer for the VC to be realized just about whenever they want them to be realized, and keep them in the limbo of there-but-not-realized for as long as they wish. I am not a tax attorney, but I know a few VCs and I would be astonished if they ever get trapped into paying income taxes on gains that they intend to reinvest. I am certain that would be a rookie mistake.
Tony C:
someone at some point unless their ancestors were royals or thieves or both had to earn the money somehow.
Please don’t tell me the lottery because it would still be their money/property.
Tony C:
So you enter society from a state of nature and you then vote your rights away? You need to read Locke and some other stuff.
Sorry, kderosa, but you’ve once again mistaken me for someone taking you seriously.
@Roco: You sound ridiculous, and you are lying again. Work is not part of life; many people live their entire lives without being required to work a single day for a single dollar. Look at the Royals in Britain, or the many children of billionaires in this country, like Paris Hilton.
Actually, we CAN vote to turn the Constitution into whatever we want; that is part of the Constitution, you dolt. We can repeal the First Amendment by vote, we can pass a new Amendment by vote, we can do all of that. I calculate, that according to the rules of our Constitution, we can repeal and amend that into whatever the hell we want, including a socialist state, if we want. There is nothing in the Constitution that demands Capitalism.
It is your religious belief that work equates to life, not mine. If the law is to protect individuals from other individuals, then is is perfectly reasonable for us to demand that food and drugs and equipment and companies all be inspected for and adhere to standards of safety, because those standards of safety protect individuals from harm by the negligence or malice of other individuals. Why are you opposed to regulation, when virtually all regulation is designed to protect indivduals?
You are the feeble minded dolt, and a liar to boot, either that or you were too busy making paper airplanes in sixth grade American history class to actually learn what the word Amendment actually means, or the rules for how one changes the United States Constitution. By VOTE, dolt.
@TonyC and interlopers GeneH and Miike “anilingus” Spindell
On each of your examples there is an underlying right being acted upon and which the (super) majority has agreed to give to the government to enforce via its police power.
Right of self defense — right to maintain an army, right to declare war, right to control border.
Right to property/liberty (to be free from damage by others) building safety, food safety, drug safety, road safety, inspections and testing to ensure standards are met.
And, no I do not agree that you can delegate a right to government that you don’t possess. Simple? Yes. I like simple, so does Occam’s razor.
Of coure you think you have the right to compel others in the absence of a right. That is the argument being debated. You haven’t justified that power and all your example miss the point since they all rely on an underlying right.
Also your tax example is inaccurate. Take a look at IRS Pub 544. Sellingstock is a capital gain/loss and not subject to the Like-kind property exemption. How do you think Bill gates and Warren Buffet got so rich? Hint, they haven’t sold their company stock yet. No taxes have been paid, except for income drawn. So if these two moguls are incentivizd already with our paltry 15% capital gains rate such that they haven’t cashed out yet, why do we need your confiscatory tax rates?