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The validity of the public debt of the United States... shall not be questioned [1]

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Date: 2023-01-06

Well, xaxnar and Charles P. Pierce beat me to the punch, but I think I have a few useful things to add concerning the Public Debt Clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

The 2013 issue of the Duke Law Journal published The Debt Limit and The Constitution: How The Fourteenth Amendment Forbids Fiscal Obstructionism, by Jacob D. Charles. Now Charles, from what I can see, appears to be an originalist with views on the Second Amendment and gun “rights” I do not agree with. But he has some very interesting things to say about the (anti)Republican Congressmen who want to force a government shutdown in the name of “fiscal responsibility”:

..Congress has acted unconstitutionally during debates over raising the debt limit by causing the validity of the public debt to be questioned in violation of the Public Debt Clause.

And,

Assuming a departmentalist account of executive power, when

the Public Debt Clause is violated by congressional actions that place the debt’s validity in substantial doubt, the president can refuse to enforce—that is, refuse “to carry into effect”32—the debt limit and order the Treasury Secretary to continue borrowing funds to meet the government’s obligations. This authority is not an imperial power, but a solemn duty—a requirement that the president refuse to allow Congress to violate the Constitution.33

The big question, of course, is how do we impose legal and political penalties on these members of Congress who are acting unconstitutionally when they push for a government default?

I think one thing Democrats must do is begin emphasizing this argument that fanatics in the (anti)Republican Party are acting unconstitutionally, and show how their anti-government doctrines are a political reincarnation the Confederate slave holding oligarchs we defeated militarily in the Civil War — and that the 13th,14th and 14th Amendments were intended to prevent those oligarchs from rising to power again. (Yeah, we failed the first time, but there’s no reason to stop trying. Because, what other solution is there?)

Heather Cox Richardson, author of How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, is really, really good at doing this. We need to get the Democratic leadership to pay attention to her scholarship, and begin using her arguments to bludgeon the (anti)Republican Party extremists.

In her blog of January 4, 2023, Richardson explained:

The roots of today’s Republican worldview lie in the Reagan Revolution of 1980.

Reagan and his allies sought to dismantle the regulation of business and the social welfare state that cost tax dollars, but they recognized those policies were popular. So they fell back on an old Reconstruction era trope, arguing that social welfare programs and regulation were a form of socialism because they cost tax dollars that were paid primarily by white men while their benefits went to poor Americans, primarily Black people or people of color. In that formula, first articulated by former Confederates after the Civil War, minority voting was a form of socialism that would destroy America. When Reagan used this argument, he emphasized its idea of economic individualism over its racism, but that racism was definitely there, and many of his supporters heard it. When he stood about seven miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Ku Klux Klan members had murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner just 16 years before as they tried to register Black people to vote, and said “I believe in states’ rights,” the racist wing of the old Democratic Party knew what he meant and voted for him. In the years since, party leaders cut taxes and deregulated business while rallying voters with warnings that government policies that regulated business, provided a social safety net, or protected civil rights were socialism that redistributed white tax dollars to minorities. In the 1990s, under the leadership of House speaker Newt Gingrich, Chamber of Commerce lawyer Grover Norquist, and talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, the party purged from its ranks traditional Republicans, replacing them with ideological fellow travelers. As their policies threatened to lose voters by concentrating wealth upward and hollowing out the middle class, Republicans increasingly warned that minority voters wanted socialism and were destroying the nation to get it. Trump rode that narrative to power, and now tearing down the current government is the idea that drives the Republican base.

The spectacle of less than two dozen radical anti-government extremists creating history by obstructing the election of a Speaker of the House is more dangerous than just an entertainment to which we are invited to “bring popcorn.” It is small comfort that the political crisis of being unable to elect a Speaker of the House indicates that the Constitutional political system is accurately reflecting the acrimony and discord of the party political system. Both times this has previously happened, our country was plunged soon after into terrible crises — the Civil War, and the Great Depression — in which millions of lives were lost and ruined.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/6/2145735/-The-validity-of-the-public-debt-of-the-United-States-shall-not-be-questioned

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