The validity of the public debt of the U.S.....shall not be questioned (14th Amendment)

[grantcart]

18. Well a lot of the nations' leading legal scholars disagree with you

So its not as simple as your condescending and oversimplified post suggests.

Public debt is public debt and whether it was done in a continuing resolution or a budget is not relevant.

Now it may be that it would be upheld but a substantial number of the leading legal scholars believe that the whole exercise may well not stand a test in court:

Google lists dozens of constitutional experts who don't think that it is constitutional, I will post from the first one:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/why-wont-obama-just-declare-the-debt-ceiling-unconstitutional/2011/07/29/gIQAe5xkhI_blog.html

But is Carney right? A growing number of top Democrats strongly disagree and think the 14th amendment option is a good last resort. “Is there anything that prohibits him from doing that?” Iowa Senator Tom Harkin told The Hill today. “The answer is no.” Thursday, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer described it as the least bad option if Congress doesn’t act. Former President Bill Clinton’s on board, too. And a growing number of law professors and legal scholars are now arguing that Obama would actually prevail.

Yale’s Jack Balkin explains how this would work. At some point after Aug. 2, Obama would face the demands of multiple contradicting laws. By law, the government is supposed to pay out money that’s already been appropriated. But the Treasury’s obligations would exceed revenues, and, under debt-ceiling law, the government’s not allowed to print new currency or float new debt.

So, Balkin notes, Obama “has a constitutional duty to treat at least one of the laws as unconstitutional as applied to the current circumstances.” And, lo, Section 4 of the 14th amendment does say, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, … shall not be questioned.”

If Obama decided to treat the debt ceiling as unconstitutional and start floating new debt anyway, it’s not clear anyone could stop him. As Jeffrey Rosen writes in The New Republic today, individual members of Congress wouldn’t have standing to stop him—Congress would need to pass a joint resolution, which is unlikely given that Democrats control the Senate. It’s also unlikely that individual taxpayers or bondholders would have standing. “The most likely outcome is that the Supreme Court would refuse to hear the case,” Rosen argues. And if a case did somehow make it through, Rosen notes, even the conservative justices would likely rule in his favor—at least if they were consistent with their judicial philosophies. (Okay, so that’s not an ironclad assumption.)

As long as the President is spending public money on expenditures already approved by Congress then it would seem to fall into the 14th Ammendment guarantee of payment of debt.

If Congress wants the President wanted to stop the Executive from making particular expenditures all they would have to do is to pass legislation that ammends the previous spending authority.

To pass authorization specifically and then to deny the debt generally seems to be thin gruel and I would have the same opinion if it were a Democratic Congress and a Republican President. I wish we had stopped the charade when we controlled both houses in Congress, it is a childish exercise and has been since Congress started passing it in a fit of jealousy at an expanding executive.