Former Pres. Bill Clinton: Obama should use 14th Amendment to bypass Congress

Former President Bill Clinton said that if he were in President Obama's shoes, he would bypass Congress on the debt and invoke the 14th Amendment “without hesitation, and force the courts to stop me.”

“I think the Constitution is clear and I think this idea that the Congress gets to vote twice on whether to pay for [expenditures] it has appropriated is crazy,” he told National Memo's Joe Conason.

But the former President said he didn't believe it would come to that, according to an article at Politico.

According to Clinton, raising the debt ceiling is necessary to pay the nation's debts.

Jennifer Epstein wrote:

Clinton said that raising the debt ceiling “is necessary to pay for appropriations already made.” Congressional Republicans, he said, “can’t say, ‘Well, we won the last election and we didn’t vote for some of that stuff, so we’re going to throw the whole country’s credit into arrears.”

But a post at the American Spectator takes issue with Clinton's reasoning:

This echoes a view from the New Republic which patly suggests that once Congress decides to spend the money, the president's duty is merely to borrow.

Not really. The 14th Amendment doesn't call for Congress to borrow whenever it needs money. It simply instructs Congress to pay for what it spends. Meaning it can choose to cut spending, raise taxes, or print more currency. Arguing as Clinton does would also license the president to print more currency in order to pay the bills, effectively running down the value of the dollar.

It's like saying that once you've maxed out all your credit cards, you have no choice but to transfer the balance to a new credit card.

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