President Obama chose an odd forum to confess his apparent desire to rule the United States as a dictator. Speaking last week to the National Council of La Raza in Washington, Obama said, “I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own. And believe me, right now dealing with Congress — believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting.”
We already knew that La Raza had no respect for this nation’s laws. Its No. 1 policy goal is amnesty for the millions of illegal immigrants. Those are people whose first act in this country, by definition, was to violate our nation’s immigration laws.
So it is not surprising that when Obama said, “That’s not how our democracy functions. That’s not how our Constitution is written,” a La Raza member shouted “Change it!” to great applause.
La Raza obviously has zero respect for the U.S. Constitution, but what about the rest of the Democratic Party?
As our nation has drawn closer to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s Aug. 2 debt limit deadline, more and more Democrats have suggested that Obama invoke the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and just ignore the federal government’s legal borrowing limit entirely.
House Minority Whip James Clyburn, R-S.C., told the Associated Press, “If that’s what lands on his desk, a short-term lifting of the debt ceiling, he should put it on his desk next to an executive order. He should sign an executive order invoking the 14th Amendment to this issue.”
What on Earth does the 14th Amendment have to do with the debt limit? Well, Section 4 reads: “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law … shall not be questioned.” Democrats like Clyburn claim this one sentence empowers Obama to borrow as much money as he wants.
But Clyburn and other advocates of a unilateral presidential raising of the debt limit are ignoring Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which grants Congress, not the president, the exclusive power “to borrow money on the credit of the United States.”
In fact, until 1917 when they created the debt limit, Congress would authorize each specific issuance of U.S. debt. The Treasury’s authority to issue securities at all is derived entirely from the same law that created the debt limit.
Nothing in the 14th Amendment changes that. The 14th Amendment simply does not transfer the power to borrow money from Congress to the president. What Section 4 of the 14th Amendment does do is prevent Congress from disavowing a debt once it has been incurred.
So while Congress can legally change anyone’s Social Security benefits tomorrow, the 14th Amendment prevents Congress from invalidating any of China’s U.S. Treasury bonds.
The scariest part about the Democrats’ novel interpretation of the 14th Amendment is that if Obama did choose to go the Clyburn route, he would probably get away with it.
Even though, as Harvard professor Laurence Tribe has argued, an Obama executive order instructing Geithner to ignore the debt limit would be plainly illegal, it would be next to impossible to obtain a court ruling saying so.
Contrary to popular belief, senators and representatives have no special standing to sue the president. They can be granted standing to sue by law, but the debt limit statute does not have one. “This is not a circumstance in which the courts have any plausible point of entry,” Tribe has said.
So far, Obama has said he does not share Clyburn’s view of the 14th Amendment. But that was before the Treasury Department ran out of money. Come Aug. 3, we will see if Obama gives in to temptation.
Conn Carroll is a senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
