Biden can, and should, ignore the GOP's debt suicide attempt [View all]
BY ROBERT HOCKETT AND LAURENCE TRIBE
Conservative commentators have undertaken to pen apologetics for radicals. The subject? Our latest adventure in Republican-threatened financial suicide.
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Take first, then, this remarkable would-be assurance: A minority of “House Republicans’ insistence on negotiations [about raising the debt ceiling] is not hostage taking,” but, “it is the ordinary stuff of politics.”
It is hard to fathom how anyone not either blissfully or willfully unaware of American budgetary history since 1974, not to say contract law and the U.S. Constitution, could so much as suggest such a thing.
For one thing, threatening default upon debt incurred by your own — that is Congress’s own — already legislated current budget in order to gain leverage you don’t democratically have over next year’s budget is anything but “ordinary.” It is overtly threatening the contract rights of literally millions of innocent people, not to mention our own Constitution and prior budget legislation. And it is doing so simply to get your way when you cannot convince your congressional colleagues of the merits of your own budgetary druthers.
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4009101-biden-can-and-should-ignore-the-gops-debt-suicide-attempt/
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