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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (95931)	7/2/2011 3:33:12 PM
From: Dale Baker	Respond to of 149317

No surprise there. The zealous and the faithful don't care where something came from as long as it preaches The Gospel they want to hear. That's how our politics works these days.

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (95931)	7/3/2011 4:06:59 PM
From: Mac Con Ulaidh	Respond to of 149317

The debt ceiling The constitutional option Jun 30th 2011, 20:58 by M.S. I LACK the übermenschlich resolve required to contemplate the debt-ceiling situation for any prolonged period of time, as I'm afraid it will begin staring back at me. Instead I'll just make quick oblique references to the argument over the so-called "constitutional option" and dance away before I get sucked into the vortex. Here goes: Jonathan Zasloff thinks that if Congress fails to reach an agreement to raise the debt ceiling, the president can simply ignore the debt ceiling and order the Treasury to continue issuing debt anyway. Matt Zeitlin sketches out the reasons why such action might be upheld in the courts: as Bruce Bartlett argues, the constitution states that "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law…shall not be questioned", and court rulings in the past make it very difficult for anyone to get standing to sue the government to stop it from ignoring the debt ceiling. Jonathan Chait thinks invoking the constitutional option would be a good idea. Ezra Klein thinks it would be a bad idea, as it would shift the conflict from Congress, which bond markets still believe (perhaps wrongly) will always come to a deal in the end, to the Supreme Court, where bond markets would have no idea what to think will happen. Mr Chait says Mr Klein misunderstood him; he advocates invoking the constitutional option as a last resort if the early-August deadline nears with no deal in sight and markets are already starting to freak out. And Matthew Yglesias thinks the constitutional option might well be better than any deal that might be reached, as reaching a deal (clearly possible only on Republican terms) would mean the debt ceiling will become a permanent occasion for insane governance-crippling legislative hostage-taking forever. Uh oh, I feel myself being pulled inescapably down. Quickly then: Mr Chait seems to have a pretty strong case here. Mr Klein describes the problem thusly: continued... economist.com