The debt limit scam

I am  continually agog at the gullibility of Democratic politicians and public officials who nearly unanimously insist that just ignoring the congressional debt limit would be some sort of constitutional or political catastrophe. I am not in the least agog at the gullibility of reporters and pundits, who are generally ignorant of the subjects they write about, but at least the New York Times has for once given a platform tosomebody who knows what he is talking about. (This is the first time I ' ve tried gifting a NYT article, let ' s hope it works.) Robert Hockett is a professor of law at Cornell and he has worked for the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. You would think that Janet Yellen would know as much as he does but apparently not. Debate hasintensified over whether President Biden might sidestepthe debt ceiling in order to keep paying what the nation owes.There arepowerful legal reasons and arguments for him to do so. These includethe 14th Amendment, which prohibits questioning what we already owe, andthe so-called later-in-time rule of statutory construction, which basically means that Congress ’s most recent budget legislation trumps any earlier legislated ceiling.In other words, as a legal matter this is very simple. Congress passed a debt limit, thensubsequently passed legislation requiring spending that would exceed that limit. That ' s it, this is not even a constitutional issue to begin with. But if you don ' t b...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs