The One Person Who Can Stop the Republican Sabotage of Our Debt

No free, constitutional government should provide legal means for its own sabotage. The 14th Amendment offers a way out. It is not only a directive to Congress that it must not vote to default; it also enjoins every officer of the government, including the president, to recognize the sanctity of the nation’s full faith and credit and to take care that it be maintained.

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If the debt-limit dysfunction continues, President Biden must direct the Treasury secretary to take the steps required to prevent default.

It’s time to end the charade of the debt-limit vote and stop legislative terrorism on it for all time.

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...as much as Republicans thundered about the debt [in the '80's], the knife they held at the throat of financial markets was made of rubber. They had no intention of carrying out any threat as long as a Republican was president.

The threat became more serious after the Newt Gingrich revolution. The United States came close to default in 1995 (accompanied by a government shutdown), 2011 (causing a government bond rating downgrade) and 2013 (also bringing a debt downgrade).

See a pattern? In each case, there was a Democrat in the White House. 

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After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment helped establish the terms of the American victory over the Confederacy. Section 4 of that amendment states that “the public debt of the United States, authorized by law,” shall “not be questioned.”

Some may hold that a president invoking it to include bond issuance would violate Congress’s Article I appropriation powers. But the 14th Amendment would require all necessary steps ...

No president has invoked the 14th Amendment to address the debt ceiling. But in 2011, when President Barack Obama faced Republican opposition to raising the ceiling, an ex-president, Bill Clinton, said that, rather than leave the country vulnerable to default, if he were then in office, he would raise it using the 14th Amendment “without hesitation and force the courts to stop me.”...

I see another pattern: Bubba was the last Democratic president who fought Republicans. 

In my estimation, the Supreme Court would most likely dismiss a legal objection as a dispute between two branches, and the debt-ceiling vote might go the way of many other conflicting or redundant statutes...The situation with this issue is untenable, since Republicans seem to care not about the actual debt so much as about using debt-ceiling crises under Democratic presidents for political advantage.

Why should we take it for granted that constitutional war powers must be so broadly construed that a president has sole authority to start a global nuclear war while appropriation powers are so narrow that the president dare not save the country from financial disaster?

Mr. Biden should use the tools the Constitution provides to protect the country, use the bully pulpit and tell us in a prime-time address why he did it and turn around a public opinion

I'm with Bubba and this guy, "all necessary steps." Use the 14-A, mint the trillion dollar coin, do whatever it takes. Flay the Republicans to the bone.