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Professors Laurence Tribe of Harvard and Robert Hockett of Cornell and Georgetown have each written op-eds for the New York Times making excellent arguments against caving in to Republicans debt ceiling threats.
Today the two brilliant professors team up in The Hill in a response to spurious defenses by certain conservatives of the Republicans’ tactic in Biden can and should ignore the GOP’s death suicide attempt:
The conservatives claim that it is “ordinary politics” to use this tactic. The response:
For one thing, threatening default upon debt incurred by your own — that is Congress’s own — already legislated current budget in order to gain leverage you don’t democratically have over next year’s budget is anything but “ordinary.” It is overtly threatening the contract rights of literally millions of innocent people, not to mention our own Constitution and prior budget legislation. And it is doing so simply to get your way when you cannot convince your congressional colleagues of the merits of your own budgetary druthers
On top of the express language of the 14th Amendment, a 1974 law passed to rein in Richard Nixon’s “impoundment” of funds appropriated by Congress, requires the executive to spend appropriated funds.
Read the whole thing.
And the arguments are having an effect: