Refusing to negotiate in good faith on raising the nation’s borrowing limit, Senate Democrats are calling for President Joe Biden to invoke the 14th Amendment to bypass Congress in a move that would almost certainly trigger a Constitutional crisis.
With the clock ticking down toward a potential default and the far-left party and its leader stubbornly refusing to consider sensible cuts in spending, top senators relying on the advice of radical left-wing legal ideologues are urging Biden to pull the pin on a grenade that will be inevitably be lobbed into the Supreme Court where the 6-3 conservative majority would determine the constitutionality of such a dramatic move.
While Biden has so far been hesitant to go to such a nuclear option, he did leave open the possibility during a recent interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle who asked if he was “prepared to invoke the 14th Amendment and blow through the debt ceiling?”
“I’ve not gotten there yet,” Biden said, although pressure from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other high-profile Senate Dems could provide cover for a president who has repeatedly shown his willingness to run roughshod over the Constitution.
Biden does not dismiss using 14th Amendment to ‘blow through the debt ceiling’ https://t.co/DuNwQukSAj pic.twitter.com/Hz0WaqKuaq
— BPR (@BIZPACReview) May 10, 2023
“The 14th Amendment is not anyone’s first choice. The first choice is that the Republicans raise the debt ceiling because the United States government never, ever, ever, ever defaults on its legal obligations. But if Kevin McCarthy is going to push the United States over a cliff, then it becomes the president’s responsibility to find an alternative path,” Warren said, according to The Hill.
“I personally feel that we should test that and I think that the language is very explicit in that amendment,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) responding to a question on whether Biden has the authority to do what no president has ever done before, also acknowledging that by doing so, there would be a court challenge.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who just threatened to impeach former President Donald J. Trump a third time said “there’s a strong argument” that President Biden “has authority” to invoke the 14th if Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) insists on spending cuts.
“But I think we should have an agreement to raise the debt ceiling without having to resort to that authority,” he added.
“MAGA wants a default. It’s everybody else’s responsibility to prevent one,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said, according to The Hill, smearing GOP deficit hawks, claiming that McCarthy would run the nation into the rocks “unless we repeal all the things that we enacted last Congress, which is essentially the same as asking for a default,” digging in to protect the obscene amounts of money for climate change initiatives and putting teeth into the IRS with funding for 87,000 new agents that Democrats rammed through in the Orwellian-titled Deficit Reduction Act.
One legal authority who is being cited is Harvard University professor emeritus Laurence Tribe, a left-wing zealot who in a New York Times op-ed last week argued that Biden not only had the authority, but duty to invoke the 14th Amendment, which states “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.”
It’s the same amendment that Democrats and their allies have used to justify barring Trump from ever holding office again and also to call for booting conservative lawmakers out of Congress using a clause put into place in the aftermath of the Civil War, resuscitating it for the modern purpose of consolidating the party’s iron-fisted grip on political power by overriding the will of the voters.
“Professor Tribe rightly points out that the 14th Amendment creates a plausible way to deal with the debt ceiling, even in the face of the Republican hostage taking,” Warren said, as reported by The Hill, slightly hedging on whether she was calling on Biden to go for it as early as next month, “it depends what the alternative is.”
“If the alternative is that the Republicans are going to hurdle us over a cliff in which the American economy crashes, we’re thrown into a recession and millions of people are put out of work and our good name around the world is destroyed, then not-great alternatives look like a better option than chaos,” added Warren. “The language seems pretty straightforward and it’s hard to reconcile the language in the 14th Amendment with a law passed by Congress that creates a debt ceiling.”
The idea that Democrats and Biden would resort to such a reckless measure didn’t sit well with Senate Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) who recently said that Biden “unconstitutionally acting without Congress” is “not an option.”
Adding fuel to the fire was Trump who, during last Wednesday’s CNN town hall, urged Republicans to not back down on spending cuts for what he said should never have been approved in the first place.
Collins: The U.S. Defaulting would be massively consequential for everyone —
Trump: You don't know. It's psychological more than anything else… get all of that money that was wasted and if they don’t get rid of it, they have to default pic.twitter.com/XZbLJA9qSX— Acyn (@Acyn) May 11, 2023
GOP Senate Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said that if Biden did go the route of the 14th Amendment, it would likely end up in the Supreme Court.
“That will be tested. I think it would have to be litigated in court,” Thune said, according to The Hill. “It’s not a realistic solution to the current crisis but my understanding is he’s talking about potentially raising that issue and getting some sort of a legal reading on it for the next time around.”
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