Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivers a devastating speech on the floor of the Senate calling out Obama for threatening to veto the Boehner plan should it make it to his desk. Well, actually, Obama isn’t even willing to make the threat himself and is instead hiding behind the skirts of some unnamed advisers. This is nothing but a completely transparent attempt on Obama’s part to shift any blame for a veto to someone other than himself should it actually come to that.
But McConnell correctly calls Obama out as being willing to veto the country into default, an action that he himself has described as having devastating consequences for not only the U.S. but the entire world, all for purely partisan political purposes. So Obama apparently cares more about his own chances for re-election than he does for the good of the country. Being a Liberal, I am not surprised.
More constitution shredding by the Democrats. They accuse the Republicans of shredding the Constitution on a regular basis but it is they who regularly run afoul of its plain and clear intent. They do this by selective reading thereof. Dishonest and self-serving interpretations designed to meet their needs du jour.
The debate over the debt ceiling is no exception. They are selectively quoting the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to further their own political gains and shredding the Constitutional protections it provides in the process.
Their latest theory seems to be that a single cherry picked phrase from the 14th Amendment somehow gives Obama the power to ignore the law and place himself as the supreme authority over the national coffers. To wit they cherry pick the following:
Section. 4. 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. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
So what exactly is the plain meaning of the highlighted phrases? Simply put, all this says is that there is a national debt and that people cannot simply argue it out of existence. It simply says that the United States Government is authorized to take on debt to meet it’s obligations. That’s it. Period.
This says nothing about who determines when and how much debt can and should be taken on by that government. The problem here is the Democrat slight of hand which is at play. Note that no one has questioned the “validity of the public debt“. No one is arguing that the government cannot take on such debt. No one is arguing that the debt does not exist. And most assuredly no one is suggesting that the debt which has already been taken on should not be repaid with full interest.
It is a straw man argument meant to distract honest citizens from the reality of the situation.
So if this passage is not indicating who is in control of what debt is taken on and when, then how are we to know who the Constitution invests that power in? Well, the Constitution includes a passage to address that very question. This is a passage that the Democrats are selectively ignoring when they make this argument. There is a fifth clause to the 14th Amendment which quite clearly addresses this point:
Section. 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
This seems quite plain in its meaning. It is the Congress who is invested with the authority to control the public debt via appropriate legislation. Legislation like that which establishes the debt ceiling that the Democrats seek to circumvent and whose actions are clearly in conflict with the plain meaning and intent of the text of the 14th Amendment.
Once again we see the Obama Administration for what it clearly is: a rogue and out of control group of Constitution Shredding Cowboys with no respect for the rule of law or for duly authorized Constitutional authority.
It is another shameful day for Democrats.
But it’s not clear that Congress can constitutionally impose a debt ceiling on the President. The debt limit we have now is the legacy of a 1939 law designed to allow the Treasury flexibility to borrow up to a certain limit. But Geithner and a number of constitutional scholars have questioned whether Congress can prevent the president from paying obligations that the government has already incurred. That’s because a passage in the Fourteenth Amendment—designed to prevent Southern politicians from repudiating Civil War debts—stipulates that “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law… shall not be questioned.” What exactly that means is a complicated legal question, but as Jonathan Chait writes, the clause was intended to prevent politicians from using the threat of default for political leverage—which is exactly what Republicans are doing now.
Well, I have to agree with the primary sentiment of the following editorial: Obama is a failed leader by his own words. As a Senator he denounced the need to raise the debt ceiling as “a failure of leadership.” I can’t agree more.
June 12 Daily News Editorial
Politicians must despise the Internet.
It took all of 10 seconds to find then Sen. Barack Obama’s 2006 comments about raising the debt ceiling. Speaking as the junior senator from Illinois, Obama said, “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies.
“Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here’. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”
Well, now it’s 2011 and President Obama wants the debt ceiling raised above its current level of $14.3 trillion.
The GOP proposal, which would have raised the statutory borrowing cap to $16.7 trillion, did not get a single Republican vote and garnered just 97 Democrats in favor. Three-hundred-eighteen lawmakers voted ‘no,’ including 82 Democrats and all 236 Republicans in the chamber. Seven Democrats voted present.
…
House Democrats, at the urging of Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), voted against the legislation because he didn’t think it wise for Democrats to open themselves up to a “political 30 second ad,” he told reporters — a sign that Democrats are well aware of the peril with which they vote to pile onto the national debt without accompanying spending cuts.
House Republicans were looking for Democrats to fall right into that trap. Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) had 114 Democrats on a letter calling for such a vote. Betting that the national mood will back budget cuts and fiscal responsibility, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) responded to Welch and President Barack Obama’s call for a clean debt limit vote by scheduling one on the floor.
So the Democrats have been running around whining about how we need to raise the debt ceiling in a clean vote to save the country and the economy without any strings attached and when the Republicans call their bluff by actually scheduling exactly that, well then suddenly that’s a trap. A panic stricken Steny Hoyer has to run around encouraging Democrats to vote against the very thing they wanted.
Totally and utterly busted, the Democrats are. (A little Yoda speak for ya).
This just exposes how the Democrats are only interested in playing politics and not doing the right thing for the country. If a clean vote on raising the debt ceiling, there very thing they had been lobbying so hard for all this time, was in fact the best thing for the country they would have backed it by voting for it. Caving like this exposes how vacuous their previous pleas actually were, and still are.
They couldn’t even muster the 114 Democrats that had signed a letter calling for this exact vote.
The Republicans are really showing that they have the right stuff in this budget fight thanks in large part to the Tea Party influence. The message is clear and even the Democrats have admitted it with this vote: It’s the Spending Stupid!
