Saturday, July 30, 2011

How would the Supreme Court rule if Obama uses the 14th Amendment to borrow money if the debt ceiling is not raised?

A few previous posts have highlighted the ongoing dispute concerning the language in the 14th Amendment which mandates that the full faith and credit of the US should be maintained and whether this means that Obama can go ahead and keep borrowing money to meet obligations.

So what if he does and a challenge to that action is brought up in court?

There is reason to believe that the Supreme Court may not even rule on that case since few if any people will be able to state that they have standing before the court:

When it comes to Congress’s ability to stop the Obama administration from ignoring the debt ceiling, legal experts note that the first obstacle standing in its way is the question of standing, or whether a certain party has the right to sue over an issue in the first place. Jonathan Zasloff, a professor at the UCLA School of Law who has discussed this idea on a blog that he writes with several other academics, told me that while an order from the president for the Treasury Department to continue issuing new debt sounded extreme, it was unclear who could prove sufficient injury from the decision that would qualify the person to sue the administration in court. “Who has some kind of particularized injury, in fact?” Zasloff asked, and he could not come up with a satisfying answer.

Part of the reason for Zasloff’s difficulty in identifying an appropriate plaintiff is that members of Congress have tried before to sue the president for diminishing their legislative and appropriating power and have typically failed. . . .

Even if they do decide to hear it, past voting records and philosophies suggest that Most justices - with the exception of Thomas - would side with the president.

A post in Volock Conspiracy argues that a recently decided Supreme Court decision might provide an opportunity for standing to be granted.

All this aside, Andrew Sullivan seems to think this is all an impeachment trap.