While calls have been escalating among Democrats for President Biden to end the debt limit standoff by declaring it unconstitutional, the president himself has made it clear that invoking the 14th Amendment’s language that “the validity of the public debt of the United States ... shall not be questioned” is not going to get Washington out of the mess it is in.
“I’m looking at the 14th Amendment as to whether or not we have the authority — I think we have the authority,” Mr. Biden said over the weekend. "The question is, could it be done and invoked in time that it would not be appealed, and as a consequence past the date in question and still default on the debt. That is a question that I think is unresolved.”
“Unresolved” is putting it mildly. President Barack Obama’s legal team rejected this option during the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, and Mr. Biden himself has repeatedly expressed his own wariness to the expansion of presidential power it would require to declare the World War I-era law creating the debt ceiling to suddenly be void a century later.
The truth is, there is only one viable solution as the nation stands on the verge of a catastrophic default: a deal between Mr. Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). A June 1 deadline is looking firm. There was hope the nation could survive financially until a couple of weeks later, when a flood of tax payments will come in, but that seems unlikely. Outside groups from Goldman Sachs to the Congressional Budget Office warn the “X-date” will hit in early June. If the key players can’t reach a deal this week, Congress must enact a short-term extension of the debt ceiling, as it has many times before.
The hopeful news is that the president and House speaker are continuing to talk. A reasonable compromise would be to agree to something close to a two-year freeze in discretionary spending that saves more than $1 trillion over the next decade. A harder call right now is whether to include defense in that freeze, given the demands being placed on the Pentagon by Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s eyeing of Taiwan. But the Defense Department has suggested programs it would like to sunset, implying there are some areas where its budget could be trimmed. Budget deals in the past have also raised or capped defense and nondefense spending in similar ways.
However, enacting caps beyond two years doesn’t make sense — and isn’t realistic. The nation has seen that playbook in the 2011 deal that forced harsh cuts across the board for a decade and slowed the economic recovery. Remember when the nation suddenly didn’t have enough air traffic controllers at airports because of the cuts?
Mr. Biden has said that clawing back some unspent covid funds could be “on the table.” The White House has also reportedly explored some small additional work requirements for cash aid. The president should hold the line, however, against conditioning Medicaid eligibility on work requirements. Arkansas tried this, and the result was mainly to create extra paperwork and kick people off who couldn’t navigate the complicated reporting system. Surely after the pandemic, the nation has learned how much people need basic health-care access.
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End of carousel- Lawyers plead guilty in racketeering case in Fulton County, Ga.
- The Biden administration announces more than $100 million to improve maternal health.
- Wisconsin Republicans back off impeachment threat against justice.
- Bahrain’s hunger strike ends, for now, after concessions to prisoners.
- A Saudi court sentences a retired teacher to death based on tweets.
Attorneys for Donald Trump have pleaded guilty in the racketeering case led by Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani T. Willis. Even those lawyers related to the deals focused on equipment-tampering in rural Coffee County are relevant to the former president — they help to establish the “criminal enterprise” of which prosecutors hope to prove Mr. Trump was the head. The news is a sign that the courts might be the place where 2020 election lies finally crash upon the rocks of reality. The Editorial Board wrote about the wide range of the indictment in August.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced more than $103 million in funding to address the maternal health crisis. The money will boost access to mental health services, help states train more maternal health providers and bolster nurse midwifery programs. These initiatives are an encouraging step toward tackling major gaps in maternal health and well-being. In August, the Editorial Board wrote about how the United States can address its maternal mortality crisis.
Wisconsin state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) announced Tuesday that Republicans would allow the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau to draw legislative maps, a dramatic reversal after years of opposing such an approach to redistricting. A new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court is expected to throw out the current maps, which make Wisconsin the most gerrymandered state in America. Mr. Vos has been threatening to impeach Justice Janet Protasiewicz, whose election this spring flipped control of the court, in a bid to keep those maps. This led to understandable outcry. Now it seems Mr. Vos is backing off his impeachment threat and his efforts to keep the state gerrymandered. Read our editorial on the Protasiewicz election here.
Prisoners are eating again in Bahrain after the government agreed to let them spend more hours outside and expanded their access to visitors, a welcome development ahead of the crown prince’s visit to Washington this week. Activists say the monthlong hunger strike will resume on Sept. 30 if these promises aren’t kept. Read our editorial calling for the compassionate release of Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, a political prisoner since 2011 who participated in the strike.
A retired teacher in Saudi Arabia, Muhammad al-Ghamdi, has been sentenced to death by the country’s Specialized Criminal Court solely based on his tweets, retweets and YouTube activity, according to Human Rights Watch. The court’s verdict, July 10, was based on two accounts on X, formerly Twitter, which had only a handful of followers. The posts criticized the royal family. The sentence is the latest example of dictatorships imposing harsh sentences on people who use social media for free expression, highlighted in our February editorial.
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House Republicans, meanwhile, should reconsider their base-pleasing demand that cuts next year fall solely on nondefense programs. For one thing, Democrats would surely reject such a lopsided exemption. Swinging an ax carelessly at the remainder of the budget could also do irreparable damage, given that education and transportation are some of the largest nondefense discretionary spending categories. Students are still recovering from pandemic learning loss. Meanwhile, the nation is finally making long-needed — and bipartisan — improvements to infrastructure. Other vital programs that should be protected include public safety and courts.
Mr. McCarthy keeps claiming the nation has a “spending problem.” The part he leaves out is the spending problem is driven largely by the fact that Social Security, Medicare and health-care costs are shooting up. Yet House Republicans and Mr. Biden don’t want to touch Social Security and Medicare.
Default would be madness. It would jolt markets and the economy and, perhaps worst of all, tarnish U.S. standing in the world. The nation needs a deal this week. The time for posturing and brinkmanship is over.
