25.05.2023
14th amendment threat
The debt-ceiling crisis is the direct result of the antiquated constitution, argues Daniel Lazare, but ‘emergency measures’ would be a gift for Trump
Under the heading of “Be careful of what you wish for”, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling on Joe Biden to solve the US debt-ceiling crisis by invoking a constitutional clause declaring that the “validity” of US public debt “shall not be questioned”.
The clause is part of the 14th amendment - one of three post-Civil War amendments adopted between 1865 and 1870 that were designed to seal the union’s victory over the south. By rendering US federal debt inviolable - and by simultaneously declaring that not one penny would go to paying off the Confederacy’s wartime obligations - it supposedly allows Joe Biden to declare a century and a half later that Republicans are violating the constitution by pushing the country to renege on its debts and that he therefore has a perfect right to lift the debt ceiling on his own.
It is a bold stroke that would cut Republicans off at the knees - not undeservedly, since the party’s position is so hypocritical as to beggar belief. After voting for a string of budgets that have enabled the federal government to consistently spend approximately $5 for every $4 it takes in, Republicans are now shocked - shocked - that federal debt now stands at $31.4 trillion, or 120% of GDP, even though they authorised the build-up in the first place.
Not that the Republican position is without a certain logic of its own. They figure that America’s governing machinery is so broken after 30 years of trench warfare on Capitol Hill that they may as well use what is left of it to ram through spending cuts and rightwing ‘reforms’, like imposing work requirements on Medicaid and food-aid recipients. The goal is to use gridlock in order to turn America into a larger version of Ron DeSantis’s Florida - a state in which state schools are forbidden to teach about racial oppression or gay rights; in which corporate taxes have been slashed; in which abortion is effectively banned; and in which courts have been packed with conservatives so as to eliminate political opposition.
If a Florida school principal can be fired for showing students a photo of Michelangelo’s David - yes, this really happened1 - then the goal is for two, three, many such dismissals from sea to shining sea. And if pushing US finances over a cliff is what it takes, then so be it. Or so Republicans say, even though it is hard to believe they really mean it.
In which case, as Sanders pointed out in a press conference last week, it will not be just bondholders who pay the price, but ordinary working people as well:
If the rightwing Republicans force a default, it will mean the loss of millions of American jobs, interest rates on mortgages and credit cards will soar, and Americans will lose trillions of dollars in household wealth ... Up to 21 million Americans will lose Medicaid, ripping away the healthcare they need to stay alive. Over a million women, infants and children would not receive the nutrition they need ... Nutrition services ... would be cut for more than one million low-income senior citizens in this country. Over 640,000 families would lose access to rental assistance and more than 400,000 low-income families would be evicted from [federally-subsidised] section 8 housing.2
Given the enormous attack on the working class this represents, it is no surprise that he and AOC are clamouring for extraordinary measures.
Undemocratic
But there is a problem: conferring emergency power on the executive branch is something that socialists should never do. Assuming that the Supreme Court goes along with it - and it is hard to imagine even today’s super-reactionary court blocking a White House effort aimed at preventing default - the result would be a major shift in favour of the presidency at congressional expense.
It is an undemocratic move that will set the stage for more crises to come. So furious will be ultra-right members like Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of western Colorado - extremists who increasingly call the shots in Congress - that it is a sure bet they will engineer another budget confrontation in the fall. Prospects of a government shutdown on October 1 will loom larger and larger as a consequence. The pressure on Biden to take emergency action will loom large as well.
But what will Sleepy Joe do in response - govern by decree? Impose martial law? Biden may be above such things. But rest assured: Donald Trump will not be, if he takes power in January 2025 - a prospect that is by now far from impossible. Indeed, he would relish the opportunity to use emergency powers to quell Democratic resistance - and the fact that he would be following up on a Biden precedent would render the experience all the sweeter. By resorting to emergency powers now, Democrats are paving the way for more emergency powers down the road.
Bottom line: you cannot use broken-down constitutional machinery to fix a problem that the breakdown helped create. Instead of calming financial markets, Biden will undermine confidence by demonstrating how ineffectual US governing mechanisms have become. Rather than reinforcing US global hegemony, he will weaken it as well by demonstrating how the American government is unable to perform basic tasks that other states take for granted. Paradoxically, US behaviour will likely grow more dangerous and erratic, as it struggles ever more desperately to maintain its position of global dominance.
The US has survived so many near-death experiences in recent decades - stolen elections, an attempted coup, government shutdowns, a similar debt-ceiling crisis in 2011, and so on - that it is hard to say whether it will stagger through yet another. The latest crisis could end tomorrow with Biden and Republican speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy jointly announcing that a deal is in hand. Or it could drag on for a week or more, at which point it will become progressively clearer that the US treasury lacks the cash in hand to pay its bills. The more desperate the plight, the greater the likelihood the White House will resort to the 14th amendment to cut the Gordian knot.
“I’m looking at the 14th amendment, as to whether or not we have the authority,” Biden told the press at the G7 conference in Hiroshima on Saturday. “I think we have the authority. The question is could it be done and invoked in time ... That’s a question that I think is unresolved.”
In other words, he will invoke it if he has to and then worry about cleaning up the mess after. Republicans will no doubt cry bloody murder. But, deep down, they will not be displeased that a financial Armageddon has been forestalled, while Trump-style Bonapartism has received another boost. The system is moving toward authoritarianism, and both wings of the bourgeoisie are helping in their own way to speed it along.
How did America’s ancient constitution cause a problem that it will now supposedly solve? The answer is simple. Thanks to the document’s elaborate checks, balances and divisions of power, the system is festooned with chokepoints that allow minor factions to gum up the works. Instead of rule by the democratic majority, the result is recurrent breakdown, as smaller and smaller minorities make the most of their ancient constitutional privileges to get their way. The far-right Freedom Caucus contains just 45 congressmen who mainly hail from the deep south, the west or rural districts up north. That is just 10% of the House, which in turn is only one of three players required to pass a budget. But it does not matter. The system gives the Freedom Caucus more than enough leverage to hold the rest of it up for ransom.
Solution
The solution, if only in the narrow technical sense, is to reform the system in order to eliminate such bottlenecks, so that the machinery can function more smoothly overall. The aim would be to strengthen democracy by curtailing special privileges. But, since the constitution’s amending clause is as frozen as the rest of the document, structural change is effectively impossible. So nothing can be done. Republicans are having a field day, while Democrats struggle to make do with a system in a growing state of collapse.
McCarthy, the 58-year-old speaker who purportedly controls the House’s slim Republican majority, is a hack from rural southern California, who would like nothing more than to reach an agreement that bolsters his own power. So would Biden - a glad-hander from the micro-state of Delaware (population: 1.02 million), who is never happier than when engaging in the mutual back-scratching that is the stuff of politics on Capitol Hill. Although Sanders and AOC see Biden as their hero, he is a centrist Democrat who has long served as a water boy for hundreds of top US corporations that have made Delaware their home, thanks to the state’s notoriously lax corporate laws.
As a member of the Senate judiciary committee, Biden helped shepherd through a major financial ‘reform’ in 2005 that made it more difficult for over-stretched homeowners to work their way out of bankruptcy - and downright impossible for college students to dig out from under a mountain of tuition debt, now estimated at more than $1.6 trillion. He has tried to chip away at Social Security and Medicaid - two programmes at the heart of America’s severely underdeveloped welfare state. In 1984, he proposed eliminating cost-of-living adjustments that enable social security benefits to keep pace with inflation. In 1995, he endorsed a balanced-budget amendment that, as he put it, would “freeze every single solitary programme in the government ... [so] that we not spend a penny more - not even accounting for inflation - than we spent the year before”. In 2007, he proposed raising the social security retirement age and cutting cost-of-living adjustments as well.3
All would penalise workers, while benefiting a rapacious corporate class. But, if giants like Alphabet (parent company of Google), Amazon, CVS Health and Comcast - all headquartered in Delaware - want stricter bankruptcy laws and smaller social security outlays, then a Delaware senator’s job, regardless of party, is to snap to attention and say ‘Yes, sir!’ - something that Biden has done time and again.
Delaware is a rotten borough straight out of the 18th century. Where Britain set about eliminating such relics beginning in 1832, America’s supposedly more modern system has allowed them to fester and grow. The result has been nightmarish levels of injustice and corruption. Yet ‘progressives’ now look to the same antiquated system for emergency relief.
Behind the House Freedom Caucus lies Donald Trump, who represents the most massive structural crisis of all. Trump could not have been more explicit in his May 10 ‘town hall’ meeting on CNN: “I say to the Republicans out there, congressman, senators, if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default.”
He went on: “Republicans should not make a deal on the debt ceiling unless they get everything they want (including the ‘kitchen sink’),” he added on Truth Social, his personal platform, last week. “That’s the way the Democrats have always dealt with us. Do not fold!!!”
So McCarthy not only has Greene and Boebert breathing down his neck, but a once and perhaps future king as well. He is paralysed, while Trump follows a classic ‘strategy of tension’ aimed at sabotaging US finances, so as to make Democrats look feckless and weak. If successful, the goal is to then make his way through the wreckage on the way to a White House victory in November 2024. It is an ultra-risky gambit that fairly ensures that Trump will be even more of a risk-taker second time round - and hence even more extreme and confrontational.
The working class should do everything it can to prevent such a takeover. But it cannot defend democracy with a decrepit constitution dating from the age of slavery. And it should not fall for emergency measures by the Democrats that will pave the way for even worse.