The 14th Amendment

Liberals like to think of the Constitution as an evolving, elastic or flexible document, but in this case they are simply making it up. The president has no authority unilaterally to saddle the country with more debt. Article I Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress the power "to borrow money on the credit of the United States." This is a specific, enumerated power given to Congress alone. The debt provision of the 14th Amendment was originally intended simply to ensure Federal debts accrued during the Civil War and deny any claims for compensation on debt entered into by the Confederate States. It was not a sweeping and unprecedented grant of executive power that has lain dormant for a century and a half. And the part of the Section 4 that liberals like to edit out is the passage that states debt must be "authorized by law," not by executive diktat. And if this does not convince them, Section 5 states clearly that "the Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article." In fact the debt provision of the 14th Amendment means the exact opposite of what leftists are trying to torture out of the text.

Posted via email from Global Politics