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Bill Clinton: I Would Invoke The 14th Amendment To Raise The Debt Ceiling ‘Without Hesitation’
By Pat Garofalo on Jul 19, 2011 at 9:35 am
Former President Bill Clinton told the National Memo’s Joe Conason yesterday that, were he still president, he would invoke the 14th Amendment “without hesitation” to raise the debt ceiling if Congress fails to do so by the Aug. 2 deadline:
Former President Bill Clinton says that he would invoke the so-called constitutional option to raise the nation’s debt ceiling “without hesitation, and force the courts to stop me” in order to prevent a default, should Congress and the President fail to achieve agreement before the August 2 deadline.
Sharply criticizing Congressional Republicans in an exclusive Monday evening interview with The National Memo, Clinton said, “I think the Constitution is clear and I think this idea that the Congress gets to vote twice on whether to pay for [expenditures] it has appropriated is crazy.”
Lifting the debt ceiling “is necessary to pay for appropriations already made,” he added, “so you can’t say, ‘Well, we won the last election and we didn’t vote for some of that stuff, so we’re going to throw the whole country’s credit into arrears.”
The 14th Amendment reads, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law… shall not be questioned,” which some scholars have interpreted as giving the president the authority to pay off all outstanding obligations of the United States, regardless of the statutory debt limit imposed by Congress. Prof. Garrett Epps, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Baltimore, wrote in the Atlantic that “it’s not hard to argue that the Constitution places both payments on the debt and payments owed to groups like Social Security recipients — pensioners, that is — above the vagaries of Congressional politics.”
Republican economist Bruce Bartlett wrote that the president has “constitutional authority to take extraordinary measures to protect the public credit and prevent a debt default even if it means disregarding the debt limit, which is statutory law subordinate to the Constitution.” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has hinted that the debt ceiling violates the 14th Amendment, and several senators have been looking into the validity of the administration disregarding the statutory debt limit.
As ThinkProgress’ Ian Milhiser wrote, “The 14th Amendment’s Public Debt Clause has never been tested in court, so it is anyone’s guess how it would apply if President Obama decided to save the country from economic ruin by continuing to spend the money Congress lawfully appropriated after we hit the debt ceiling. But it is not even clear that courts would take the case if someone sued to force the United States to default on its debts.” According to Clinton, Treasury officials during his administration looked into invoking the 14th Amendment in case the debt ceiling wasn’t raised.
-------------------- Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.
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quote:Originally posted by jordanreed: The ceiling has been raised 102 times since 1917...every year since then. 8 times under geo bush....nothing new and it must be done....and will
yeah i agree it must be done, but we really are living in some tough times. just because so and so president raised it (yes i know regan did, big woop) and we have raised it for so long....what if we started to lower it piece by piece? how much better we would be off i think.
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people complain that Obama has increased the deficit so much but they fail to grasp how Govt really works.
all that spending Bush did? it didn't stop when Obama took office. In fact? the spending Bush created anew also increased over time even after he left office.
The stimulus complaints are a perfect point- 40% of the stimulus "spending" was actually tax cuts not spending at all...
Bush never included the cost of the wars in the actual budget so the discussion was avoided. The Congress GAVE him "supplementals" to pay the extra cost of the war. The first thing Obama did was to roll the supplementals into the regualr budget so the totals spending would be discussed.
we are spending too much- we never needed a Dept of Homeland Securrity- that was and still is the biggest increase in discretionary Govt spending ever, and the costs continue to grow. That is owned completely by the GOP. The FBI could have done that job with modest increase in budget- instead we have a whole new layer of bureacracy. But the politicians like to create whole new layers of bureacracy because by choosing their own Faithful to man it as it is first built? They get place their Chosen "swords" into positions of great power for decades to come...
the Chertoff group? look into how much of our precious tax money those skanks are are raking in- it's sickening
what we really need is a way to reward the rank and file civil servants for whistleblowing. Right now? Anybody who reports waste fraud and abuse i smost likely to be jobless within a year or two- fix that and a couple of other bureuacratic idiosyncracies and you'll save hundreds of billions of dollars not just this year but for decades to come.
what they are doing up in DC right now is about bring on a full depression. The loss of AAA rating (and higher mortgage interest rates) is just the first round, the second round is the loss of another 300,000 jobs within a year- and just about every one of them represents susbstantial middle-middle class family losing their house. then well you know where i'm going with this that would trigger the loss of twice as many private sector obs in the hnext fews months, etc...
the "thing" is? i am fairly sure teh TParty "Patriots" think they are doing this for the betterment of something, but i cannot for the life of me figure out what they think they are fixing...
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise.
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homeland security is as much of an oxymoron as the department of justice or military intelligence. just words with very little relationship to reality.
DHS has a program that encourages:
“See Something, Say Something” program that encourages Americans to report “suspicious activity,”
Ah, nazi Germany anyone?
-------------------- It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.
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