My pal referenced before asked me who’s out on a limb and then sent me this column by the liberal constitutional lawyer Lawrence Tribe who dismisses the idea of using the 14th amendment to ignore Congress on the debt ceiling. Tribe goes further arguing that using the 14th amendment to circumvent the Congress would itself imperil the full faith and credit of the United States:
So the arguments for ignoring the debt ceiling are unpersuasive. But even if they were persuasive, they would not resolve the crisis. Once the debt ceiling is breached, a legal cloud would hang over any newly issued bonds, because of the risk that the government might refuse to honor those debts as legitimate. This risk, in turn, would result in a steep increase in interest rates because investors would lose confidence — a fiscal disaster that would cost the nation tens of billions of dollars.
GOP Senator Mitchell has offered the President a very peculiar solution which however circuitous suggests he knows full well how much danger the GOP mania is placing the nation in.
President George W Bush’s ex adviser, David Frum, suggested the LBJ solution in which Obama would stall the debt ceiling crisis by holding federal money from GOP controlled states.
The reason for all this panic is a plot device out of Dr. Strangelove in which the Soviets (or in this case the GOP) have a device to blow up America’s economy if anyone dares raise a tax.
My friend seems to be enjoying this as an academic exercise. Screw my friend! He thinks like a hermit. He’ll crawl out of his cave after the pin is pulled to see if radiation poisoning has killed the rest of us. If it hasn’t then maybe we’ll reelect the GOP to keep running the nation. Let’s hope for another Y2K.
