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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (96793)	11/29/2012 8:31:42 AM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217588

C2, surely you are not suggesting that obama should break another law? According to the constitution scholar, edition.cnn.com "... Like Congress, the president is bound by Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which states that "(t)he validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law . . . shall not be questioned." Section 4 was passed after the Civil War because the framers worried that former Southern rebels returning to Congress would hold the federal debt hostage to extract political concessions on Reconstruction. Section 5 gives Congress the power to enforce the 14th Amendment's provisions. This does not mean, however, that these provisions do not apply to the president; otherwise, he could violate the 14th Amendment at will. Section 4 requires the president not to put the validity of the public debt into question. If the debt ceiling is not raised in time, there will not be enough incoming revenues to pay for all of the government's bills as they come due. Therefore he has a constitutional obligation to prioritize incoming revenues to pay the public debt: interest on government bonds and any other "vested" obligations. What falls into the latter category is not entirely clear, but a large number of other government obligations -- and certainly payments for future services -- would not count and would have to be sacrificed. This might include, for example, Social Security payments. To be sure, the president could keep paying Social Security if he could keep the total amount of debt constant by redeeming bonds in the Social Security trust fund for cash and immediately selling new bonds to replace them. But the money coming in may not be able to keep pace with the money going out. Even if he tries his best, the president may not be able to pay every Social Security check in full on time... "