This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church and I'm joined as always by the Libertarian Professor Richard Epstein.

Here at Hoover, Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow.

He's also the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU

and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

And Richard, we are about a week away from a hard debt default date.

And I think even more people are suggesting that President Biden would have the authority to continue paying our bills even if that date passed.

And I'm speaking specifically about a recent op-ed in the hill

by Robert Hawket and Lawrence Tribe,

who argue that President Biden, quote, can and should ignore the GOP and quote if it

won't agree to his terms and then continue and then he should continue paying our

obligations and I know we talked about this a little bit before, but I really want to understand the 14th Amendment argument.

You know, we've chatted and as we read the 14th Amendment, it makes sense to us that you know, you can't, we're going to, we're not going to pay, sorry, this happened because we're not going to pay the Confederacy's debts, we're paying unions debts, we're keeping them whole. But Tribe and Hawke

argued that the 14th Amendment even came about because when the conflict

started up, secessionists, those in the South,

had thought to destroy the Union by making a default on its debt.

And so therefore, part of the reason for the debt clause in the 14th Amendment

was to make sure that this couldn't happen.

But that's, is that right? Can you talk me how to understand this in a historical context?

This makes absolutely no sense to me. I mean, it was quite clear that if the South we decided to withdraw from the Union, it would not be responsible for the debts of the unions and it can occur in some debts. And essentially if you're going to succeed from a union,

you're not going to worry about the fine points of the debt authorization

under the existing Constitution.

...