(C) Common Dreams
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The Constitutional Case for Disarming the Debt Ceiling [1]
['Thomas Geoghegan', 'Matt Ford', 'Alex Shephard', 'Patrick Caldwell', 'Jason Linkins', 'Walter Shapiro', 'William Browning', 'Grace Segers']
Date: 2023-01-06
This point is set out by the Supreme Court in Byrd v. Raines, a 1997 case brought by the late Senator Robert Byrd, whose protégé was Senator Manchin. Byrd was an inveterate advocate of the institutional power of Congress. On behalf of Congress, in his official capacity, and not because of any injury to him, Byrd, along with others, challenged the Line Item Veto Act. That law allowed the president to cancel spending and tax measures in a bill even after the president signed it into law. The court held that individual members of Congress had no standing to challenge an injury to Congress as an institution: Rather, it was up to Congress to take away the president’s authority expressly. Here too, if Congress did not like the amount of debt that Congress had incurred, there is a simple institutional remedy—pass a law, admittedly over the president’s veto, to slash Social Security or anything else it likes. After all, Congress can shut down the funding of the federal government. What it cannot do is to challenge the validity of the public debt.
The question arises: To what extent does the Biden administration, or the Democrats in Congress, really want to stop the GOP from engineering a default? Give some rope to the GOP to hang the Constitution, and it may end up hanging the GOP instead. Let the public see that the House Republican caucus is ready to destroy the public credit in order to slash Social Security and Medicare, which could be the price it demands from Biden. Republicans’ intransigence would leave them on the hook for all the chaos in the financial markets that a debt ceiling breach would unleash. On that issue alone, the Democrats might bring about the destruction of the GOP. It may seem appealing to let the House ruin the public debt if it destroys the GOP.
But the cost is too high. Debt has been the country’s greatest asset, as Hamilton knew it would be. Debt let us grow. Debt let us win World Wars I and II. In this century, debt saved us from the financial crisis. Debt let us survive Covid. A fine recent book, In Defense of Public Debt, by four distinguished economists, explains how much we owe to debt. We have an obligation to save it for crises ahead and use every means, legal or political, that may help to do so. It is typical of the GOP to treat the country’s debts as dishonorably as Trump treats his own. Default is his business model. The Framers would be horrified if we made it the country’s model too.
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[1] Url:
https://newrepublic.com/article/169857/debt-ceiling-law-terminate-constitution
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