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Compendium of posts on Hobby Lobby and related cases
The Anti-Torture Memos: Balkinization Posts on Torture, Interrogation, Detention, War Powers, and OLC
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Obama is already invoking the 14th Amendment
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Obama is already invoking the 14th Amendment
JB
Some Democrats in Congress, including Steny Hoyer, have called for President Barack Obama to invoke the 14th Amendment to resolve the debt ceiling crisis.
What they don't realize is that Obama has already invoked it in effect. Despite his statement that his lawyers told him it wasn't a "winning argument."
What?
Obama has already told bond holders that there will be no default on bonds. He plans to use existing revenues to pay off interest on the debt and other vested obligations. This is required by section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Whatever he says in public, his lawyers have almost certainly told him something like that.
But that means less money for other government services, including social safety net programs like Medicare.
So we'll see a partial government shutdown once the government runs out of other options.
This in turn will place enormous pressure on Congress to raise the debt ceiling, which it should have done in the first place.
By requiring a priority rule for payment of bondholders, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment forces the President's hand, which leads to a partial government shutdown, which leads to a political resolution of the crisis.
What if Congress still won't budge after months of government shutdown? Even then, Obama has to wait until the markets threaten to implode and the validity of the public debt is put into question. Then Section 4 says comes into play again, and, in that extraordinary set of circumstances, would require him to act to prevent a meltdown.
But we won't get there. Section 4 already guarantees that. And Obama knows it. No matter what he says in public.
Read other posts on the debt ceiling crisis
Posted
8:57 AM
by JB [link]
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David Pozen, The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford University Press, 2024)
Jack M. Balkin, Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation (Yale University Press, 2024)
Mark A. Graber, Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform after the Civil War (University of Kansas Press, 2023)
Jack M. Balkin, What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said: The Nation's Top Legal Experts Rewrite America's Most Controversial Decision - Revised Edition (NYU Press, 2023)
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Mark Philip Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak, eds., Making the Forever War: Marilyn B. Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021).
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Frank Pasquale, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI (Belknap Press, 2020)
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Mark Tushnet, Taking Back the Constitution: Activist Judges and the Next Age of American Law (Yale University Press 2020).
Andrew Koppelman, Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty?: The Unnecessary Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Ezekiel J Emanuel and Abbe R. Gluck, The Trillion Dollar Revolution: How the Affordable Care Act Transformed Politics, Law, and Health Care in America (PublicAffairs, 2020)
Linda C. McClain, Who's the Bigot?: Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Sanford Levinson and Jack M. Balkin, Democracy and Dysfunction (University of Chicago Press, 2019)
Sanford Levinson, Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (Duke University Press 2018)
Mark A. Graber, Sanford Levinson, and Mark Tushnet, eds., Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? (Oxford University Press 2018)
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Cynthia Levinson and Sanford Levinson, Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws that Affect Us Today (Peachtree Publishers, 2017)
Brian Z. Tamanaha, A Realistic Theory of Law (Cambridge University Press 2017)
Sanford Levinson, Nullification and Secession in Modern Constitutional Thought (University Press of Kansas 2016)
Sanford Levinson, An Argument Open to All: Reading The Federalist in the 21st Century (Yale University Press 2015)
Stephen M. Griffin, Broken Trust: Dysfunctional Government and Constitutional Reform (University Press of Kansas, 2015)
Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015)
Bruce Ackerman, We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2014)
Balkinization Symposium on We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution
Joseph Fishkin, Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Mark A. Graber, A New Introduction to American Constitutionalism (Oxford University Press, 2013)
John Mikhail, Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls' Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal Judgment (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Gerard N. Magliocca, American Founding Son: John Bingham and the Invention of the Fourteenth Amendment (New York University Press, 2013)
Stephen M. Griffin, Long Wars and the Constitution (Harvard University Press, 2013)
Andrew Koppelman, The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Health Care Reform (Oxford University Press, 2013)
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Mary Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2012)
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Jack M. Balkin, Constitutional Redemption: Political Faith in an Unjust World (Harvard University Press, 2011)
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Ian Ayres. Carrots and Sticks: Unlock the Power of Incentives to Get Things Done (Bantam Books, 2010)
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Jack M. Balkin, The Laws of Change: I Ching and the Philosophy of Life (2d Edition, Sybil Creek Press 2009)
Brian Z. Tamanaha, Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging (Princeton University Press 2009)
Andrew Koppelman and Tobias Barrington Wolff, A Right to Discriminate?: How the Case of Boy Scouts of America v. James Dale Warped the Law of Free Association (Yale University Press 2009)
Jack M. Balkin and Reva B. Siegel, The Constitution in 2020 (Oxford University Press 2009)
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Jack M. Balkin, James Grimmelmann, Eddan Katz, Nimrod Kozlovski, Shlomit Wagman and Tal Zarsky, eds., Cybercrime: Digital Cops in a Networked Environment (N.Y.U. Press 2007)
Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck, The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds (N.Y.U. Press 2006)
Andrew Koppelman, Same Sex, Different States: When Same-Sex Marriages Cross State Lines (Yale University Press 2006)
Brian Tamanaha, Law as a Means to an End (Cambridge University Press 2006)
Sanford Levinson, Our Undemocratic Constitution (Oxford University Press 2006)
Mark Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (Cambridge University Press 2006)
Jack M. Balkin, ed., What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said (N.Y.U. Press 2005)
Sanford Levinson, ed., Torture: A Collection (Oxford University Press 2004)
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