I guess I’m adding to a list I started compiling Sunday.
As Jim points out in today’s Jolt, the last statutory debt limit ($31.4 trillion — up from $5.7 trillion on January 20, 2001!) was signed into law by none other than President Joe Biden.
Yet, according to the newfangled thinking of Biden and Democrats, the debt ceiling must be lifted because, no matter how out-of-control and beyond-our-means federal spending may be, it has been “authorized by law,” in 14th Amendment terms. Ergo, it “shall not be questioned” — the government simply must borrow whatever it will take to pay up.
Let’s put aside that there are obvious differences (at least they ought to be obvious) between spending bills and “the public debt of the United States.”
My question is: How is it that spending may not be questioned when it has been authorized by law, but that the debt limit may not only be questioned but ignored, notwithstanding that it is every bit as much authorized by law?
Indeed, when, as noted above, Biden signed the debt limit into law, that was after the limit was enacted by Congress, the only branch of the federal government constitutionally empowered “to borrow money on the credit of the United States” (art. I, §8, cl.2) and to pay the debts of the United States (art. I, §8, cl.1). When the 14th Amendment alludes to the public debt of the United States, it is referring to the debt that, under Article I, only Congress may incur and discharge.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but when Biden signed the current debt limit into law, I don’t recall his making the slightest suggestion that he feared he was acting unconstitutionally. Such a suggestion would have been frivolous (but it’s not like that would have stopped Biden, who is the opposite of discrete, if he’d thought there might be some fleeting advantage in making such a suggestion).
Isn’t the debt limit, then, among the laws the president has taken a solemn oath to faithfully enforce?