On the debt ceiling: Biden should ask for forgiveness, not permission

04 May 2023

When it comes to the debt ceiling, one thing everyone agrees on is failure to lift it is badbadbad for everyone. So the president should avoid waiting for permission from the House Republicans. He should just go ahead and pay the country’s debts, then say sorry for stopping a mass global panic.

He won’t have to do that.

What little leverage the House Republicans have (if you can call it that) is presuming the Biden administration will not continue borrowing and paying off debts without authorization by the Congress. Now, according to the Times, the White House seems prepared to take away even that.

Administration officials are debating whether to ignore House Republicans. The theory, the Timesreported, “rests on the 14th Amendment clause stating that “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

Moreover, Times correspondent Jim Tankersley reported: “A group of legal scholars and some liberal activists have pushed the constitutional challenge to the borrowing limit for more than a decade. No previous administration has taken it up. Lawyers at the White House and the Justice and Treasury Departments have never issued formal opinions on the question. And legal scholars disagree about the constitutionality of such a move.”

These questions are serious but so are the consequences of failing to maintain the full faith and credit of the United States. I’m no authority on the matter, but it seems to me common sense to think that normal people are not going to wonder about the constitutionality of lifting the cap after about $15 trillion in personal wealth around the world goes poofthph

They are going to wonder why Biden didn’t act.

No previous administration has considered moving without congressional authorization because no previous Congress has demonstrated so much willingness to play a game of chicken in which everyone loses. No lawyers from any federal department have issued any opinions about it for the same reason. The House Republicans are forcing the issue. They never balked when the Trump administration made the same request. The most prudent choice, then, would be for Biden to ask for forgiveness, not permission.

The irony is the House Republicans probably won’t ask for an apology. If they did, they’d have to admit to being mainly responsible for forcing the issue. Imagine hearings in which Jim Jordan demands to know why Biden privileged billions of normal people over his dearly beloved Constitution.

But Jordan won’t, because, as the chair of the House select committee that’s currently investigating the weaponization of the federal government, he’d rather avoid bringing attention to the fact that his party is weaponizing the federal government, in this particular case, his dearly beloved Constitution.

Jim Jordan would rather avoid such a sight because most people most of the time believe the Constitution is a contract among Americans, for the protection of Americans, not a contract on them. Jordan and his comrades need us to see them as honorable stewards of liberty. That public image fades the moment they’re seen using the Constitution as a ransom note.

The president may not need to diss the Congress, though.

The House Democrats are working on a plan to force a majority vote that would lift the borrowing cap, making the whole problem disappear, for now. They need just four House Republicans for the “discharge petition.” (It requires 218 signatures. The Republican House majority stands at 222.)

You can be sure four of them are looking for reasons to sign. You can be sure one of those reasons is knowing there are no good reasons not to.

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