You ready?

I was born ready.

Welcome to advisory opinions. I'm Sarah Isger. That's David French. And we've got a fun little, I don't know, it's a popery, David. We're going to talk about the constitutional underpinnings of this debt ceiling fight.

A little revisit on history or tradition and that Disney lawsuit, the DeSantis quagmire in the swap will call it. And finally, a little lesson on how not to kill your parents in the state of Tennessee.

All right, David. Let's start at the beginning here. The debt ceiling fight is raging in Congress. You have a Democratic president not wanting to negotiate with Republican House members. In the meantime, we are hurtling towards our debt limit by which people fear that the United States will no longer meet its debt obligations that could cause any number of economic problems.

We're not so much interested in any of that. Instead, we're interested in the 14th amendment section four, which I will read to you now.

The validity of the public debt of the United States authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for service in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

So David, there was a New York Times piece and there's been little whispers and shenanigans that what this means is that the debt ceiling itself as in Congress setting a statutory limit of how much debt the United States can incur is unconstitutional.

Therefore, Congress doesn't need to raise the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is void, if you will. And then in fact, the president has an obligation with or without Congress to meet all debts incurred by the United States because of this 14th amendment provision.

And again, if you take out the including language, which is clearly a post civil war, just to make sure we're being clear here about civil war debts.

The validity of the public debt of the United States authorized by law shall not be questioned.

David, do you think there is a constitutional argument that the Biden administration doesn't need to have a debt ceiling fight because there is no debt ceiling. There is no spoon.

That's a good reference, by the way, Sarah.

I like that. We'll see how many people get that.

But that's a fantastic reference. Yeah. So I'm going to cutting to the chase. I tend to agree that the debt ceiling.

Well, let me put it this way.

Obviously, the language is pretty darn clear. You can't default on the debt. So I think it's a better to say constitutionally the United States is not permitted to default on the debt, which is doesn't exactly answer the question of is the debt ceiling.

Unconstitutional.

Here's a there is a great large view article from 2012 after the most after the debt ceiling fight that occurred in the Obama administration by Neil Buchanan and Michael Dorf.

And he says that in 2011 and this is a I think this states it pretty well that Obama and now Biden face a trilumma offering three options of dubious constitutionality.

So one is ignore the debt ceiling and unilaterally issue new bonds. Thus usurping congresses bar borrowing power, which is specified elsewhere in the Constitution.

Unilaterally raised taxes thus usurping congress's taxing power.

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