Bill Bill Clinton: Obama Should Ignore Congress on Debt, Invoke 14th Amendment

• Posted on July 19, 2011 at 9:07am by Billy Hallowell

Former Democratic President Bill Clinton has come out swinging at Congress, telling The National Memo’s Joe Conason that he would take decisive action if no debt deal is reached by the August 2 deadline. Clinton says that if he were in Obama’s situation, he’d invoke the Fourteenth Amendment to raise America’s debt ceiling “without hesitation, and force the courts to stop me.”
Clinton, who came out strongly against Republicans in an exclusive interview with The National Memo on Monday, said:

“I think the Constitution is clear and I think this idea that the Congress gets to vote twice on whether to pay for [expenditures] it has appropriated is crazy.
[Raising the ceiling] is necessary to pay for appropriations already made…so you can’t say, ‘Well, we won the last election and we didn’t vote for some of that stuff, so we’re going to throw the whole country’s credit into arrears.”

Clinton faced his own debt battles as president during two government shut downs. Back then, though, he didn’t consider utilizing the Fourteenth Amendment, because the debt ceiling was not brought in as part of the overall debate. The National Memo has more:
According to Clinton, the Gingrich Republicans thought about that tactic [using the debt ceiling] before rejecting it — and Treasury officials who served under Clinton commissioned legal research on the president’s power to raise the debt ceiling without congressional approval. While some legal scholars believe the Fourteenth Amendment requires Congress to fund the debt that results from its appropriations, and therefore empowers the president to raise the debt ceiling, others vehemently disagree.

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