Democrats and Republicans will this morning release their separate plans to raise the debt ceiling before the August 2 deadline. But only one plan can pass and Congress is running out of time. The lack of time has thrown a spotlight on the 14th amendment, which some say would allow President Obama to increase the debt ceiling on his own.
Larry Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, discusses the constitutionality of the 14th amendment in the debt ceiling debate.
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Comments [3]
In regard to the present budget debacle I can not fathom why the top 1% of our country's rich are not taxed appropriately, or why they are receiving tax write-offs for sending jobs overseas...The Republicans need to back-down...and we cannot lose our credit rating...not spending more than is made...a novel idea...
A balanced budget amendment that must pass super majorities in both houses of the Congress and approved by majorities in at least 38 states is a fiat?
However if the President on his own authority uses section 4 of the 14th Amendment in an extremely controversial and perhaps unconstitutional way that creates unlimited debt, that is not a fiat?
If a balanced budget amendment was passed in 1995 when it was tired, would we have a $14 trillion debt today?
In his intro, John Hockenberry described a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution as being something like "balancing the budget by fiat, I suppose."
That's an odd turn of phrase, and I suspect that in large part it reflects John's own bias against the concept, and against the proponents of a balanced budget.
"Fiat" is ordinarily used to describe an authoritarian or even an arbitrary governmental order. There is a little-used term, "fiat money," which Merriam-Webster defines informally as, "money (as paper currency) not convertible into coin or specie of equivalent value." One might therefore suspect that we are all owning a lot of fiat money right now, if we don't get our financial house in order.
But let's think about a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It would require passage by both houses of Congress, the signature of a President, and passage by the legislatures of a supermajority of the states. That's not "authoritarianism." That's the popular will of the American people.
And moreover, it would seem likely that each and every federal budget under a balanced budget limitation would also be subject to Congressional negotiation, bargaining and approval. As we see with states now working to balance thier annual or biennial budgets.
So that's not much of a "fiat," John.
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