https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016352334
But wait, there is more.
We said that conservative claims betrayed an unawareness or willful elision of federal budgeting and debt incurring as astounding as their assaults on the 14th Amendment. How so, you might ask?
In 1974, Congress took charge of the federal budgeting process in a way it had not done before. The precipitant was “The Imperial Presidency” of Richard M. Nixon, who had developed a worrying penchant for regularly impounding — that is, refusing to spend — funds that Congress had appropriated for specifically authorized federal programs. In effect, Nixon had been flouting both Congress’s Article I “power of the purse,” of which some commentators make pointlessly heavy weather, and the Constitution’s own Article II “take care” clause, pursuant to which the president must “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Congress’s response was the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, pursuant to which Congress, with the president’s signature, legislates in detail: federal expenditures, federal taxes, and hence, federal debt issuance to cover gaps between expenditures and taxes. This, of course, means that debt obligations are fully congressionally legislated — as precisely and as fully as federal taxes and spending themselves are congressionally legislated. The federal budget, in other words, is its own ”debt ceiling” — and indeed floor.
There is, thus, simply no role, since 1974, for the old Liberty Bond Act of 1917 — the source of the ersatz debt ceiling that Republicans now routinely wield like a weapon — to play any longer. It is a children’s toy, not a real gun, and it’s high time the Senate and all reasonable Republicans in the House called the bluff.
Lest there be any doubt on this score, we suggest that conservatives note how the current incarnation of the no longer meaningful (since 1974) Liberty Bond Act of 1917 is a would-be freestanding ceiling whose disregard leaves in place all sections of Title 31 that authorize needed borrowing — per the U.S. Code Subchapter I, sections 3102 through 3106. Conservative critics are accordingly dead wrong again, be it deliberately or inadvertently, in suggesting that we and others are proposing the president borrow without congressional authority.
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4009101-biden-can-and-should-ignore-the-gops-debt-suicide-attempt/
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