By now we should all know these words from Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution:
“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.”
That statement is not equivocal, vague, skewed by historical change, or ambiguous in any sense. It’s meaning is clear:
The questioning of the validity of legally incurred debt of the United States is unconstitutional and, therefore, itself, illegal.
Obviously that doesn’t mean that I, you, or anybody can be restrained from calling, say, the size of our national debt into question in a rhetorical sense, or as a thought experiment, or even to make a point in a speech of the floor of either Congressional chamber about it in order to persuade colleagues to take action to reduce (or even to increase) it.
No, this isn’t a clause of our Constitution that is intended to muzzle commentary regarding our national debt — a prohibition that would violate the First Amendment protection of free speech itself. What it is, simply, is a specific prohibition against any attempt — by those whose responsibility is to manage, increase, or reduce the amount of money that the US is obligated to pay based on the legally authorized acts of Congress — to call into question its validity. Therefore, the first bullet point for our President regarding this subject is:
- The very act of negotiating whether any portion of our national debt should be excised, under any conditions other than actually amending the laws that contributed to the accumulation of that debt, is itself unconstitutional. This leads to the second bullet point:
- The act of participating in such negotiations is, therefore, itself unconstitutional. I.e., even being party — even unwillingly — to such a violation of one of the underpinning documents of our Republic is a travesty, and the Democratic Party and its leaders should admit their culpability in doing so, apologize for their historical mistake, and make that the jumping off point for breaking off talks and letting the Treasury Department do what they are supposed to do with regard to paying our legally binding bills. {My thesis is that the inability to admit to historical misfeasance is this respect is likely the reason that the President and the Dems in general are finding it so difficult to face this obvious solution to a completely counterfeit, dysfunctional and illegal process.}
- Therefore: Congress has no say in negating any portion of our debt payments, other than insofar as they may legally change individual enactments they’ve made in the past to do so. Examples: Congress can raise taxes to offset the debt; or they can alter the size, going forward, of any apportionment of any kind that they’ve authorized in the past by reducing or cancelling the relevant programs in question — but doing so under regular legislative processes; or they can authorize the liquidation of government assets or holdings. But they can’t force existing programs to be changed or diminished under the rubric of an unconstitutionally contrived “debt ceiling.”
- Further participation in this gun-to-the-nation’s-head idiocy is, in effect, the worst mistake the Democrats can make at this point in history. The GOP, despite their initiation of this calamity in progress, will gleefully blame the disastrous fallout on the Democrats, and it will stick because they participated. It’s also important that the Democratic voter base will also blame them, although to a lesser degree, but a degree that will dampen turnout considerably in 2024.
- Invoking 14A Sec4 is a fait accompli. It cannot be contravened because the Secretary of the Treasury is responsible for, among other financial tasks, paying the nation’s bills. The bogus “debt ceiling” is a fiction which attempts to obscure what those bills are, that is, payable. Invoking the 14th is simply dissolving that obscurity and allowing the Secretary to do their job of paying the bills that Congress has already incurred. Once the President orders Ms. Yellen to pay what the government owes, no court can enjoin her to do otherwise because they would be both violating the clear intention of Section 4, and at that same time risking their shouldering financial calamity in the markets around the world.
- If the Invocation of the 14th is contested, Biden must simply ignore those contests, other than to point to the language of the clause at the top of this story. The Executive Branch is tasked with executing the output of Congressional action. That is all, and the only thing, that such an Invocation will be. It will not be an end-around action against Congress: the “debt ceiling” itself is a current Congress’ end-around action against prior Congressional outputs.
- No one wins if Biden doesn’t nip this in the bud, post haste. Everyone, including himself in 2024, and indeed the US and the world economy as well, loses.
Here’s a sample of a portion of the statement I think Biden should give when he finally does this, which I posted in a couple diaries a few weeks ago;
My fellow Americans:
We are on the cusp of another manufactured economic calamity that has been engineered by the members of the Republican Party. It’s their way of doing an end-around move against the rules our Constitution sets down, for the way our country fulfills its financial obligations.
Let me read to you Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America:
‘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.’
What the Republicans are doing today, and have done over the last several decades, is to violate just that clause of the 14th Amendment, by threatening to hold hostage the faith and credit of our country — that is, to question the validity of our national debt — in order to achieve what they are unable to achieve through legal legislative means.
I must confess that, in participating this kind of hostage negotiation, Democrats have unwillingly been partners in this unconstitutional charade. That ends today.
I am instructing Treasury Secretary Yellen to forthwith pay all of our national remittances as our laws direct, and as they are timely due, and to authorize the issuance of Treasury instruments of obligation, as necessary, for that purpose.
This will be the last time this fraudulent charade of a non-existent “debt ceiling” shall be entertained. From here forward, any changes to our government’s balance sheet, in any respect, must be done as the Constitution has set forth: in good faith negotiations between the members of Congress without the sword of national default hanging over both our country, and the entire world economy.
If this is taken to court by the Republicans or anyone else, our Justice Department legal team will read those exact words from the 14th Amendment and we will expect the Supreme Court to agree, as they must, with those very words.”
(Note that I include an apology for the prior misconstruing of the Constitution in that statement.)
Final note: Yes, Janet Yellen is skeptical about this, although a little less so than she properly was of the billion dollar coin trick. But she answers to Biden, and like the SCOTUS, she would be facing the disastrous fallout from her inaction if she disobeyed his order; but the Treasurer under Biden’s order, after he would have likely fired her in such case, would be authorized to carry it out.
Oh, and it the payments of debt that are hanging out there right now can be done extremely quickly, thus contributing the “fait accompli” aspect mentioned above.