Guest Post by Karl Denninger
Can we stop with the crazy?
Here’s the clause that has CNN and a bunch of other wide-eyed nuts salivating:
Section 4
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.
Key: Authorized by law.
All spending must originate in the House (per the Constitution.) However, Congress is the source of such limitation as well, and nothing in that clause — or anywhere else in the Constitution says that Congress may not bind the execution of said spending based on the receipt of taxes to offset any debt that may otherwise be required.
This is the same thing your bank does. You have $100,000 of income. You also have a credit card with a $20,000 credit line. If you keep invading it on the premise that you expect to earn $110,000 this year, because you are paid partially on commission or bonus, the bank can refuse to increase the line if that income does not materialize. Thus, when you reach the $20 large that’s all there is.
Likewise you can execute a Will that says “you get $1 million dollars provided you take care of my dog, including anything it may require to be healthy and live its best life, until its natural death.” This a two-part test and it is perfectly legal. This sort of clause is literally all over estate plans and business contracts: You get X provided you do both Y and Z. If you do not wish to do either of Y or Z then you don’t get X.
Congress has done this by enacting the debt ceiling. Neither Congress or the Executive can accurately predict how much tax revenue will come in. Taxes, of course, come from economic activity; no activity, no taxes. The CBO projects that revenue will be “X” and so does Treasury, but those are guesses because they rely on things that have not yet occurred and as such are inherently inaccurate.
Congress has set in place a two-part system for this. The first is Appropriations, which are authorizations to spend and levies to be taxed. The second is the debt ceiling, which is a hard limit on the difference between the two over time.
No, Treasury cannot go around this by claiming something in the 14th Amendment makes the Appropriation sacrosanct. Congress has the authority under the Constitution, and has exercised it, to control the purse. To be enabled by law and thus immune from being questioned debt that is issued by Treasury must be (1) issued for an appropriated purpose AND (2) be within the debt ceiling in effect at the time of said issue.
If it is then under the 14th Amendment it is valid.
This is no different than a whiny 18 year old screaming that Grandpa said he’d give said 18 year old $20,000 conditioned on him going to college and maintaining passing grades, and now he’s pissed off because he went, got drunk every day chasing girls and when he flunked out Gramps cut the money off. What we are seeing now, and have in the past, is exactly the same thing: Petulant, infantile arguments by politicians that they “deserve” to do that which they law does not permit.
Any bill, bond or other indebtedness, now matter how done via whatever means of manipulation, incurred by Treasury that results in a level of debt beyond the ceiling is not valid and to the extent that Treasury tries to conflate that they are violating the Constitution and risking the entire world declaring that none of the issued debt is in fact good as they are ignoring the predicate requirements in our prime directive founding documents.
Oh, by the way, no, refusing to raise the ceiling is not a default. Treasury has the funds to pay the principal (or roll it) and interest since rolling said debt does not increase the ceiling and the money is there to pay the interest. Those payments have legal priority so the claim that refusal to raise the ceiling would result in a “default” is a lie. What would occur is that Treasury would be unable to spend that which it does not tax first, after deducting said interest payments. That would piss off plenty of people who otherwise believe they will get said funds and who also think they’re entitled to provide good and services to the government (and then would have to choose between not providing them and not getting paid for them) but it is not a “default.”
That’s the beginning and end of it folks until and unless Congress repeals the debt ceiling entirely.
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The Heaven’s Gate Option: Congressional Democrats Beg Biden to Make Them Constitutional Nonentities
By Jonathan Turley
Roughly 25 years ago, many of us were shocked by the discovery of a home full of bodies of dozens of people laying in bunk beds, wearing jumpsuits and identical black-and-white Nike Decade sneakers. They were the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult who, with their leader, drank a lethal mix of phenobarbital and vodka to gain entry to “Heaven’s Gate” with the passing Hale-Bopp comet.
Few of us could understand how rational people could believe their leader that it was necessary to shed their earthly bodies to gain access to an orbiting alien space craft. Few would buy such a pitch, but these people did. Some of the men even castrated themselves as a sign of their faith.
This week, Heaven’s Gate came to mind as I watched members of Congress line up to take a step that runs against every assumption of self-preservation in Madisonian democracy: They sought to make themselves nonentities. They called upon President Joe Biden to reject their very institutional existence, discard the separation of powers and unilaterally borrow and spend federal money.
At one event, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) released a letter to Biden on behalf of himself and nine Democratic senators “to urgently request that you prepare to exercise your authority under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.” He was joined in this by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), among others.
Obviously, these are not Nike-wearing cultists, but that only makes their actions all the more inexplicable. These are rational leaders whose desire to nullify their own existence would have seemed entirely implausible to the Framers.
A presidential “power of the purse,” however, is a fiction, only marginally more credible than the Hale-Bopp comet’s power to whisk human souls away into space.
Their argument for it is based on Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which states, “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.”
The drafters of this amendment did not want Congress to simply dismiss its obligations to pay off the Union’s debts from the Civil War. Although the amendment is not limited to those debts, it has nothing to do with debt ceilings set by Congress. Default, after all, is not a denial of the validity of debt, but rather a refusal or failure to pay debts in time despite their validity.
Courts have long left it to the political branches to work out such differences in what is often a game of chicken with default. Moreover, as University of Virginia law professor Saikrishna Prakash recently pointed out, there is more than enough federal revenue coming in each month for Biden to avoid default by paying the interest on the debt under existing federal law. That may cause temporary problems for other spending priorities — acute problems, even — but it hardly rises to the level of a constitutional crisis.
Instead, these senators are suggesting that a president does not need congressional approval to borrow and spend trillions of dollars, even though the Constitution explicitly grants both of those powers to Congress alone. They also claim that, by demanding budget cuts as a condition of permitting further borrowing, the House is violating the 14th Amendment.
Of course, the Republican-controlled House views it differently. It has agreed to raise the debt ceiling if Biden reduces future spending. Keep in mind that the House was responding to a crippling deficit that increased by nearly $1 trillion in the first seven months of fiscal 2023.
The House was also responding to billions spent without congressional approval or support. That includes hundreds of billions in student debt forgiveness that Biden knew he could not get through Congress. Instead, he ordered it unilaterally.
So who is obstructing the payment of the debt? The White House could conceivably find a judge willing to intervene in a classic budget battle to give President Biden such unconstitutional authority, but it is unlikely to be sustained on appeal. And that may not matter. President Biden has previously taken actions that he admitted were unlikely to “pass constitutional muster” but believed “at a minimum, by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting [billions] out to people.” Yes, he said that publicly.
Biden is not the first president to disregard legislative authority. But these members of the legislative branch are beseeching their leader to ignore them and their constitutional authority. Indeed, the most important power given to Congress under Article I is the “power of the purse.” It was the ultimate control over government. Whatever entanglements or commitments a president may seek, he must ultimately get the Congress to go along.
George Mason captured that intent when he declared that “no branch of government should ever be able to combine the power of the sword with the power of the purse.”
This purported 14th Amendment loophole would reduce the separation of powers doctrine to junk bond status.
Barack Obama previously rejected this theory and said that Congress had to give him the authority to raise the debt limit.
Despite the contrary views of Obama and a host of constitutional law professors, President Biden appears emboldened by the idea. He recently made a public promise to Democrats that, while he was willing to negotiate with the Republicans, he would not agree to “anything of any consequence.”
Biden said that his support for this novel theory is a familiar name: Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe. When Biden announced that Tribe assured him of that he could act unilaterally, some of his White House counsel must have crawled into tight fetal positions.
It was Tribe who previously advised Biden that his Administration could reestablish an national eviction moratorium that the majority of the Supreme Court clearly viewed as unconstitutional. (It allowed the moratorium issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to expire since it had only days left). Biden then cited Tribe in calling for CDC to reimpose the moratorium . Biden admitted that his White House counsel and their preferred legal experts told him that the move was likely unconstitutional. However, he listened to Tribe at the urging of then Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It was found to be unconstitutional for obvious reasons.
Madison believed that, despite party or ideological affiliations, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” He established a tripartite constitutional system where checks and balances would prevent the concentration of power in any one branch or in any one’s hands.
Whatever ambition is exhibited in this latest effort, it is far removed from the institutional interests that Madison hoped would prevail over partisan interests.
Yet members are lining up for this opportunity to gut Article I, negate their own power of the purse and create an effective government not only by one branch but by one man. It is a remarkable moment. They would be destroying Congress by their own hand — and Biden didn’t even have to give them new pairs of Nikes.
There never was a Democracy that didn’t die by suicide.
We are merely the latest in a very long line.
Just recently, I have an urge to shoot everyone in the face who has ever called our Constitutional Republic a “democracy”.
Tell a lie. Make it big and tell it often enough and it becomes the “truth”.
We’ve killed ourselves. We just haven’t fallen down yet.
Re: Heavens Gate: I can understand waiting for a spaceship to take you away. The whole “cut off your own balls” thing is a non-starter for me.
Sensitive New Age Guys, Feminist Males, Progressive males, Democrat males, the Tolerant and emotionally evolved have done just that – and thrived in our post-modern slouch toward utopia.
OTOH, the long line of cuckery-as-virtue that has been foisted upon generations of Heritage American men and boys, is a trade-off quite a lot more muddled. Kinda like “covid” and consent.
Schroedingers Constitution is a thing of perpetual purple nikes to those of us who would desire to conform our lives with reality – and to keep our balls.
That our sacred scrolls seem to exist and not exist on a whim, a living constitution and originalism, designed for Heritage White Citizens of good Christian moral standing and mere magic dirt for the huddling masses of ‘migrants’ and opportunists of post-1965 dusky equatorial flight, is just as fanciful as comet spaceships when merely a matter of enlightened perspective is the arbiter.
As long as we never open the box we can debate the various labels and names in perpetuity. We can stand at the abyss and conjure our spaceship of “enshrined” rights whilst the great proposition nation continues to enslave us by the very same means.
If Joey decides to invoke the 14th to continue borrowing, CONgress can sit back and tell their constituents they had nothing to do with his action. It is the same argument they use when one of the alphabet agencies issues a rule, they claim they have no power to stop the agency, even though their legislation created the agency.
Bottom line is the executive branch has no authority in regards to enforcement of the 14th Amendment.
Section 5.
The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Congress has already given over their power to a bunch of alphabet agencies. If Putin dropped a bomb on the Capitol, they wouldn’t even be missed.
The default lie is designed to panic the people into supporting more debt. The fact that every news company is promoting the lie just shows how corrupt they are.
The real problem is that the US runs a budget deficit of $1 trillion to $2 trillion each year. If the debt limit is not raised, the budget would have to be balanced, and spending would have to be cut by the same $1 trillion to $2 trillion. That’s the rub. Every Congressman’s favorite pork project would have to be cut.
That’s about 5% to 10%, or so, of spending, and it would likely cause a recession. But the real issue is the pork.
It is a measure of just how corrupt our news media are that not a single reporter or talking head has mentioned the real issue. The US has degenerated into a Third World country.
They can find obscure clauses that they believe give justification for anything but Shall Not be Infringed is written in clear easy to undestand language not requiring mental gymnastics but it is ignored.
The 14th Amendment was meant to deal with the aftermath of the (un)Civil War … and, following the old dictum that ‘when the reason for the law ceases to exist, the law should cease to exist’, it’s long, long past time to repeal the 14th Amendment … just like the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th.
Agreed. The 14th was ratified before this nation was cursed with the wholly unnecessary 1913 Federal Reserve Act banking cartel. That 110 year swindle/coup has changed the implication of “debt” profoundly.
Congress
Conned the rest
This whole raise the debt ceiling charade is all theater. Eventually the Republicans will cave, in exchange for some trivial concessions from the Democrats, just like every other time the U.S. has approached the debt ceiling.
The government will keep kicking the can down the road until it is physically impossible to do so, i.e., until the dollar loses its status as the world reserve currency. When that happens we will not be able to export our inflation to the rest of the world anymore, and all the dollars that currently exist outside the U.S. will come home in a huge tsunami. There will only be two options at that point: 1) Continue to print money (i.e., create inflation) and initiate a Weimar Republic hyperinflation situation, or 2) Live within our means, which will entail austerity that most spoiled Americans will find incomprehensible. Option 1 is the most likely, and will ultimately cause more hardships than option 2.
I don’t know when that will happen, but it will happen at some point. Actually I expected it to happen a long time ago, but at that time I didn’t fully appreciate the power of the NWO to effect world events. The timing of the collapse will be whenever the NWO wants it to happen, and will likely be at a time that best facilitates the Great Reset.
Yes. The Constitution is dead and NO ONE in power, not even the military care about it. The UniParty will simply do whatever it thinks people will accept, rule of law be damned. Eventually other nations will no longer accept Federal Reserve Notes, and at some point not too long after, We The People will try to avoid them as well. By then, of course, the Criminals in power will have invented some new FRESH scam to shove down our throats — and all the federal agencies, and all the branches of the military will make sure we all accept it. Or else.
It’s all good Karl, just clowns clowning around inside the liberal clownworld. After the states go independent we won’t give a rip what they think.
I keep questioning the June 1 deadline. They use words like “as soon as” which means SCARE THEM WITH A DATE, ANY DATE, JUST PICK ONE THAT IS SOON.
I don’t know. Maybe there is something to this 14 th ammendment argument. SCOTUS has found a lot of other microscopic constitutional truths before.
The 14th Amendment has been misused and abused almost since the beginning … starting at least as far back as Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886) began the whole ‘disparate impact’ notion … and the misuse has continued until at least 2015 with the Obergefell decision … which, like so many 14th Amendment cases, was used to overthrow the 10th Amendment.
“Can we stop with the crazy”
No, we can’t………………..
and as long as you don’t get it,
you will keep writing stupid articles like this one!
Stop trying to rationalize an insane world, with insane leaders – PLEASE.
They don’t hear you and never will………….
Strikes me as interesting…….. So the Union Bolshevicks didn’t want to aid the south in rebuilding…or,if you will,help their fellow countrymen up out of the mud.
But have NO problem starting a war halfway around the world and then throw money at them doing exactly that!!!!!
But not to help,but to enslave……figures….