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A group of Democratic senators has said they will not support any deal on raising the debt ceiling that includes cutting vital social services and has urged President Joe Biden to invoke the 14th Amendment if necessary to continue paying the nation’s bills and avoid a default.
“The president has the authority and the responsibility under the Constitution to make sure that we continue to pay our bills. In fact, the 14th Amendment of the Constitution clearly states—not ambiguous—‘The validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned,’” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said at a press conference in Capitol Hill on May 18.
So far, Sanders and 10 Democratic senators have signed a letter to that effect, including Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), John Fetterman (Pa.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), Ed Markey (Mass.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Jack Reed (R.I.), Tina Smith (Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Peter Welch (Vt.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.).
The Democrats framed the matter as a choice, should it become necessary, between the lesser of three evils: invoking an untested and controversial Constitutional solution, defaulting on the nation’s debts, or allowing Republicans to impose steep cuts to social programs.
The country will reach the legal borrowing limit on or after June 1 if the ceiling is not raised, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. If that happens, bill payments will be delayed, and significant economic fallout will ensue, according to many experts.
Negotiations on raising the negotiations between Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) are centered on the Limit, Save, Grow Act, passed by the House in April.
The measure would raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion, enough to last for about one year, while reducing federal spending, strengthening work requirements for some recipients of federal benefits, clawing back unspent COVID-19 relief funds, and loosening restrictions on drilling for oil and gas.
Democrats believe any deal the two leaders reach could involve steep cuts to services that ordinary Americans depend on and greatly increase the consumption of fossil fuels, which they find unacceptable.
Markey clarified that the borrowing allowed under the debt ceiling goes to pay for appropriations already legislated by Congress, not new spending.
“The reality is that the debt limit isn’t about government spending. That’s a separate federal budget and appropriations process,” Markey said.
“Republicans know this but don’t want the American people to know that. What we’re talking about with the debt ceiling is whether we are going to default on the bills we’ve already incurred. It’s like racking up a bunch of spending on your credit card and then refusing to pay the bill at the end of the month.”
The debt ceiling has been raised 80 times in the past 63 years under presidents of both parties, usually without incident. Since the 1990s, Republicans have occasionally used negotiations with Democratic presidents over raising the debt ceiling to gain agreement on spending cuts, a practice Merkley characterized as a strong-arm tactic.
“So here we are with their strategy to say first we run up the deficit, and then we use the deficit to say we need to cut programs for ordinary Americans,” Merkley said. “This is a hostage taking.”
McCarthy has said it is only reasonable to use the occasion of raising the debt ceiling, which now stands at $31.4 trillion, as an opportunity to address what he calls runaway federal spending.
While the 14th Amendment solution has never been tried, it does have some advocates.
“I see the debt ceiling as unconstitutional,” Eric Foner told The Epoch Times. Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, believes the president has the constitutional duty to pay the nation’s bills.
If Congress throws “the nation into default by refusing to raise the debt limit, President Biden should act on his own, taking steps to ensure that the federal government meets its financial obligations, as the Constitution requires,” Foner wrote in a January article appearing on his website.
Noted legal scholar Laurence Tribe also supports the 14th Amendment solution.
“The question isn’t whether the president can in effect become a one-person Supreme Court, striking down laws passed by Congress,” Tribe wrote in a May op-ed for The New York Times.
“The right question is whether Congress—after passing the spending bills that created these debts in the first place—can invoke an arbitrary dollar limit to force the president and his administration to do its bidding,” Tribe concluded.
Not everyone agrees with this assessment.
Yellen has referred to the 14th Amendment suggestion as legally questionable.
Michael W. McConnell, director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, called the idea “dangerous nonsense.”
Though only a bare majority of Americans, 52 percent, admit to having seen more news about the debt ceiling negotiations recently, according to data from Ispos and Reuters released in May, most Americans want the debt limit raised if necessary to avoid a default.
According to Ispos and Reuters, 82 percent of Americans are concerned about an economic recession if no agreement is reached, and 72 percent are concerned about financial harm to themselves or their family.
Perhaps most telling, 70 percent of respondents said that Congress should raise the debt ceiling if necessary to avoid a default, according to an April poll by CBS.
Former President Bill Clinton appeared to endorse the 14th Amendment option in a 2011 interview, where he said he would exceed the debt ceiling “without hesitation, and force the courts to stop me” if that were necessary to avoid a default.
So far, no sitting U.S. president has tried it.
Sanders said he has spoken with the White House about this option. He also emphasized that Democrats were not advocating that the president invoke the 14th Amendment immediately, only that he be prepared to do so if the result of the negotiations is too extreme to be tolerated.
“I think what we’re saying is the president has the authority to use the 14th amendment, and he should be prepared to do that,” Sanders said.
“I think it’s the best solution we have. It’s not perfect. But throwing … millions of people off of health care and creating a situation with children in this country going hungry, that’s less perfect.”
