I listened to Michael McConnell, and you can too, if you’d like, which is why the YouTube video is embedded here. When he said: “All this nonsense about hostage taking is ridiculous” and that Biden “just needs to sit down with Congress and agree on some cuts” was the point where I decided that Professor Tribe is right — this guy has everything about this wrong.
Here is the portion of the debate wherein what I like to think of as the logical and reasonable reading of the situation is covered.
Professor Laurence Tribe:
I think Michael is completely wrong. Section 4 of the 14th Amendment was inserted when Abraham Lincoln realized “we need to raise lots of money”, and he had to expand the debt of the Unites States 80 fold in order to put down the insurrection. After the insurrection was put down, the same forces threatened to destroy the country from within, by making it difficult for us to pay our debts.
So the Constitution in Section 4 of the 14 Amendment made it clear that we would always pay our debts. Of course the president doesn’t have unilateral power to borrow, no one said he did. But Congress has given him that power every time it passes a budget, under something that Michael doesn’t’ seem to be talking about.
Under the 1974 Congressional Budget Act, which was designed to prevent Nixon from refusing to spend money that Congress had told him to spend. Every time a budge is passed, it automatically sets both a floor and a ceiling. After 1974 the arbitrarily ceiling that was set in 1917 really doesn’t get in the way, at all. There’s a separate free standing set of sections of 31 US Code, Title 31, which affirmatively authorize the President to borrow money though the Treasury Dept to make up the gap between the amount Congress has agreed to tax and the amount it has says he must spend.
Those sections 31.02 through 31.06, are in full effect. The other provision, which is a free standing provision in section 31.01 of Title 31 gets in the way, but it is a completely unconstitutional obstacle, because it would make us basically deadbeats. It would make the president exercise what the Supreme Court has said he can’t be given, as a matter of Separation of Powers, and that is a line item veto. He’d have to decide which debts we’d pay and which debts we don’t; is he gonna stiff the Veterans or the Social Security recipients. That is a seizure by the president of the Power of the Purse. So I think Michael has ever bit of the argument wrong.
That highlighted portion is what I’ve been basing my views on the “debt limit’ crisis on, in many comments here on Daily Kos and on Twitter:
Your thoughts?