Background
One of the best descriptions of the group of Republicans that are behind the current mess was given over 150 years ago in the Cooper Union Speech of future Republican President Abraham Lincoln referring to the Slave States:
Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.
Knowing this reality, after the end of the Civil War the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment inserted Section 4:
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
The framers knew that the Southern states would regain political power, and wanted to prevent them from reneging on the debt of the United States.
After the ‘Southern strategy’ the politicians from those states are now in the ‘Party of Lincoln’, and are talking about doing that very thing.
The Treasury has the legal authority to mint a trillion dollar platinum coin, depositing it with the Federal Reserve keeps the government well within the current debt limit and eliminates that leverage. It is legal. It is Constitutional. It is logical. Just do it and stop playing games with the whackoes in the House.
Note that this use is pay for current expenditures that have already been approved by Congress, it is not for any unapproved expenditures, so there is no conflict with the power of the Legislative branch. Congress passed the law that makes it possible.
Normally, a move like this would be inflationary, but this economy isn’t even warm, much less over-heated.
2 comments
Well said Bryan, and I agree (even if I am an outsider).
It amazes me, the more I learn about the US Constitution (the *actual and real* one, not the GOP version) and those men so many years ago who seemed to know that things such as this current debacle would happen (or at least were entirely possible)! You’d think they must have had a working *Crystal Ball* (and some of them did believe in such things – though mostly in private), or a working time machine! 😉 But in reality… I suspect they just had a very good and real understanding of Human nature and the depth’s of insanity and total self-deception possible.
Amazing really.
The guys who wrote it had just been through a Civil War that was a nasty as every other civil war in history, and had all of the wishful thinking burned out of their minds and souls. They knew what it took to end it, and had no illusions about what the other side would do if they got the chance. They weren’t prophetic, they were realistic.
The Civil War was decades in the making, and so is the current mess. This is a form of religion that is peculiar to the American South. They believe in a South that has never existed and hold it to be a type of heaven.
Human nature hasn’t changed much, and some things have changes, a few even for the better, but the regionalism has never gone away.