(C) Common Dreams
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The Ingenious Lawsuit That Could Break the Debt Ceiling Impasse [1]
['Timothy Noah', 'Grace Segers', 'Melissa Gira Grant', 'Michael Tomasky', 'Lillian Perlmutter', 'Pablo Manríquez']
Date: 2023-05-10
Perhaps you remember the impoundment crisis of 1973. It wasn’t as memorable as the Watergate scandal, but for budget dweebs it was just as important. The situation was the opposite of what we face now, with the president accusing Congress of being spendthrift and Congress saying the president lacked the constitutional authority to withhold (“impound”) appropriated funds. President Richard Nixon unilaterally decided, among other things, to suspend funding for subsidized housing and community development programs, to eliminate certain farm programs, to pare back some disaster aid, and to withhold expenditures required under the 1972 Clean Water Act.
Nixon wasn’t the first president to impound funds, but he impounded more than his predecessors did, and by 1973 Congress was getting pretty fed up with the “imperial presidency” (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s book of that title would be published in November of that year) and with Nixon himself (the Senate’s Watergate hearings would begin in May). To fight back, Congress drafted the Impoundment Control Act, which became law the following year. Weakened by Watergate, Nixon signed the bill just a few weeks before he resigned to avoid impeachment. Nearly half a century later, in 2019, Congress would impeach President Donald Trump partly for conditioning release of an appropriation for Ukraine military assistance on that nation’s willingness to investigate Hunter Biden. (Trump was acquitted in the Senate, just as he was after his second impeachment in January 2021.) The Impoundment Control Act had cleared up any ambiguity about whether the president had the power to second-guess congressional appropriations. He did not.
The genius of the NAGE lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Boston by a team of attorneys that includes occasional New Republic contributor Thomas Geoghegan, is that it doesn’t question “the controversial proposition that Congress can limit the indebtedness of the United States.” In that respect this lawsuit is quite different from any last-resort legal action the Biden administration may attempt if no debt agreement is reached. In that event, Biden will argue that Congress can’t limit indebtedness because that conflicts with the Fourteenth Amendment.
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[1] Url:
https://newrepublic.com/article/172614/ingenious-lawsuit-break-debt-ceiling-impasse
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