President Barack Obama said today he had ruled out the idea of using the 14th Amendment to ignore the debt ceiling:
Mr. Obama for the first time addressed — and ruled out — the idea that the Constitution empowers a president to increase the debt limit to prevent default and, as he put it, “basically ignore” the federal law requiring that the debt ceiling be set by statute. The argument of “the constitutional option,” which President Bill Clinton — like Mr. Obama a former constitutional law instructor — endorsed in an interview this week, is based on the 14th Amendment’s provision that the validity of the United States debt “shall not be questioned.”
“I have talked to my lawyers,” Mr. Obama said, and “they are not persuaded that that is a winning argument.”
Sandy Levinson tries to puzzle out the definition of “winning argument,” though it’s not particularly difficult. Based on the experience with Obama disregarding the Office of Legal Counsel’s views on the constitutionality of intervening in Libya under the War Powers Act while endorsing the strained interpretation of State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh, I think we have a pretty clear definition. A “winning argument” when it comes to constitutional law is the one the president wants to make.
