As the stalemate over addressing the debt ceiling continues and the threat of default looms larger, President Joe Biden has resurfaced the controversial idea of using the 14th Amendment as a way to lift the borrowing cap without Congress.
How could a 145-year-old change to the US Constitution that gave citizenship to former slaves serve as a path out of the debt ceiling drama? Government officials and legal authorities are divided over whether it does.
Some experts, including Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard Law School, point to Section 4 of the amendment as the basis of their argument that the president has the authority to order the nation’s debts be paid regardless of the debt limit Congress put in place more than 100 years ago.
“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,” reads the section, which refers to the debt incurred by the Union to fight the Civil War.
Lawmakers who crafted the amendment are very strongly saying that once the US borrows money, it has to pay it back, said Garrett Epps, a constitutional law professor at the University of Oregon. The section was designed to remove debt payments from potential post-war partisan bickering between the North and South, but it also applies to the wide divide between Democrats and Republicans today.
“The federal government is required to pay the debt on time in full,” said Epps, who has long supported using this option in the event Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling.
Were Biden to invoke the 14th Amendment to allow Treasury to borrow above the debt ceiling to pay the nation’s obligations, it would almost certainly prompt a constitutional crisis and swift legal action. The president acknowledged as much, saying…
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