![]() We just watched this Supreme Court wipe out decades of precedent to overrule Roe v. It’s that no such absolute sense matters. My point is not that more conservative readings of these laws are right in some absolute sense. Congress, the court has said, does not “hide elephants in mouse holes.” In many such cases, the court struck down those readings. Preston Byrne, a partner at the law firm Brown Rudnick, notes that the Supreme Court has often looked at statutes for which a simple reading of a limited law would seem to grant the executive almost unlimited powers. ![]() The coin gambit is similarly easy to poke holes in, if one wants to. ![]() “When borrowers fail to make payments on lawfully incurred debt, this does not question the validity of those debts their debts are just as valid as before. “For the United States to fail to pay interest or principal on its debt would be financially catastrophic, but it would not affect the validity of the debt,” he wrote. Circuit Court of Appeals, to which he was appointed by President George W. Michael McConnell, a former judge on the 10th U.S. It’s easy enough to come up with counterarguments that conservative justices are likely to find persuasive. It depends on how three conservatives read it: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who are the closest the Supreme Court now comes to having swing justices. The legality of the debt ceiling or a trillion-dollar platinum coin doesn’t depend on how liberals read the Constitution or the Coinage Act. The problem, he continued, is that “it would have to be litigated.” And that’s the problem with all these ideas and why, in the end, it’s doubtful that Biden - or any Democrat - will try them. In remarks after a meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Biden said he was “considering” the argument that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. In the other, the Treasury Department uses a loophole in a 1997 law to mint a platinum coin of any value it chooses - a trillion dollars, say - and uses the new money to keep paying the government’s debts. On Friday, 66 progressive congressional Democrats sent Biden their own letter making a similar case. In one, President Joe Biden simply declares the debt ceiling unconstitutional, pointing to the 14th Amendment, which holds that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” Five Senate Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., are circulating a letter calling on Biden to do just that. Now, two more unconventional tactics are proving particularly popular in the liberal imagination. Democrats should have eliminated the debt ceiling when they held Congress and the White House in 20. has won every game of Russian roulette it’s played so far, it should keep playing.Īnd so I understand - and share - the interest in ways to render the debt ceiling null and void. That may be true, but it’s a bit like saying that since the U.S. ![]() has never defaulted on its debts, but the debt ceiling has often motivated compromise between the two parties. Madness.ĭefenders of the debt ceiling will tell you that the limit has been around a long time and has largely operated to the good. All of this to pay money we already owe and can easily borrow. An analysis by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers modeled a more protracted default and foresaw a crash on the order of the 2008 financial crisis: The stock market falls 45%, unemployment rises by 5 points and America’s long-term borrowing costs are much, much higher. Moody’s Analytics estimates that even a short debt-ceiling breach could cause a recession. If the government doesn’t pay its bills, calamity ensues. Congress decides to spend money and later schedules a separate vote on whether the government will pay its bills. The debt ceiling might be the single dumbest feature of U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |