Should Obama Invoke the 14th Amendment and Override GOP Obstruction?

A post yesterday looked at the hope by some that rational Republicans (admittedly a dying breed), especially from the South might yet save America from a default on the national debt and the igniting of a possible worldwide economic collapse.  Such moderate Republicans would act like the Dixiecrats of old and provide a majority vote to keep the federal government operating and avoid a debt default.   However, there is another possible way out of the impasse.  One that admittedly would cause shrieks and fountains of foul, flying spittle from the Tea Party saboteurs and their even more vile Christofascist allies: President Obama could invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and order the U.S. Treasury to continue to borrow and take such other actions as might be required to affirm the federal debt. This provision reads as follows:

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.
—Amendment XIV, Section 4.

The irony would be that it would be the Democrats who would be using a Republican backed provision that sought to protect against possible Democrat sabotage of the federal government.  Here are highlights from a piece in the New Yorker:

The party of Lincoln, grand but not yet old, feared the mischief that Southern senators and representatives might get up to when their states were readmitted to the Union. The Republicans’ foremost worry was that Congress might somehow be induced to cut funds for Union pensioners or pay off lenders who had gambled on a Confederate victory. But the language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers went further. Benjamin Wade, the president pro tem of the Senate, explained that the national debt would be safer once it was “withdrawn from the power of Congress to repudiate it.” He and his colleagues didn’t say just that the debt could not be put off, or left unpaid. They said that it couldn’t even be questioned.

The new insurrection is different from the old one, and not only because this time it’s the Republicans who are the insurrectionaries. The old insurrectionaries wanted to destroy the government; the new ones wish merely to decimate it. The old ones’ weapons of choice were muskets and bayonets; the new ones confine themselves to mendacity, demagoguery, and obstructionism. The old ones were exclusively white and Southern; the new ones, while overwhelmingly white, are more widely distributed. The old ones no longer wished to be citizens of the United States; the new ones, some of them, profess to wonder if the President is a citizen at all.

Still, there are similarities. Prominent among them is a belief that a federal law need not be repealed in order to be nullified. Equally noteworthy is an apparent inability to be reconciled to the results of an election. Last November, after a campaign that turned largely on the issue of health care, Barack Obama was reëlected with a popular majority of five million. In Senate races, Democrats drew ten million more votes than Republicans. In the House of Representatives, Republicans, whom Democrats outpolled by a million and a half, retained their legislative majority only by dint of the vagaries of districting and redistricting. The Confederates had a better case: in 1860, Abraham Lincoln got barely thirty-nine per cent of the vote, a smaller share than any Presidential winner since.

In the current imbroglio, Republicans threatened that, unless their demands were met, they would (a) shut down most of the government and, more alarmingly, (b) deny the Treasury the ability to borrow the money it needs to pay expenses that Congress has already authorized. The first threat was carried out on October 1st. As for the second, John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, suddenly offered last Thursday to postpone the deadline for carrying it out—but with conditions, and for a mere five weeks. The new proposed deadline is November 22nd, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

In the end, Obama could have no honorable choice but to invoke the Fourteenth [Amendment]. There is little doubt that he would prevail. The Supreme Court would be unlikely even to consider the matter, since no one would have standing to bring a successful suit: when the government pays its bills, who is damaged? The House Republicans might draw up articles of impeachment, adopt them, and send them to the Senate, where the probability of a conviction would be zero. This would not be a replay of Bill Clinton and the intern. President Clinton was not remotely guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, but he was guilty of something, and that something was sordid. Yet impeachment was what put Clinton on a glide path to his present pinnacle as a wildly popular statesman. President Obama would be guilty only of saving the nation’s economy, and the world’s.