Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) has officially invited President Obama to give his State of the Union address before the Congress on February 12 and the President has accepted. From Boehner’s official invite: Dear Mr. President: Our nation continues to face immense challenges, and the American people expect us to work together in [...]

Ultimately it is the Supreme Court who decides the legality of unilateral ways to avoid the debt limit, be it with a platinum coin, invoking the 14th Amendment, or moral obligation coupons. But the only way the Supreme Court could end up ruling on one of these actions is if President Obama actually uses one to avoid the looming crisis, then someone with standing sued him, and the Court decided to take the case.

I would love to hear individuals threatening not to raise the debt limit have to explain why that law must be followed, but the President must break other contradictory laws to do so. I’m very interested in hearing, for example, the legal reasoning behind why Wall Street bond holders should still be paid while doctors, FBI agents and seniors should be stiffed.

The next big budget fight is going to be the debt limit, so it is critical to know when true deadline will be reach. An analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center projects that the Treasury will no long have funds to pay its bills starting some time between February 15th and March 1st. From the [...]

The next looming fight in Congress is clear and the battle lines have already been drawn. The debt ceiling will be reached in roughly two months. President Obama claims that he will not negotiate over it again. Meanwhile Republicans are demanding spending cuts with no tax increases in exchange for raising the debt limit. Republicans [...]

President Obama again re-affirmed his line in the sand over the debt ceiling saying, “while I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up through the laws that they passed.” While his statement sounds firm [...]

Just two weeks ago President Obama was taking a very firm stand on the debt ceiling. He was claiming he would never again allow something so dangerous to be used as a political bargaining chip, but almost immediately he crumbled like a sandcastle at high tide. President Obama went from demanding a permanent solution to [...]

During this fiscal cliff fight, the Obama team has only \drawn two lines in the sand. The first was on raising the tax rate for people making over $250,000 a year.  The other was refusing to allow raising the debt ceiling to be used for political gain. On both of these demands Obama has already [...]

To try to deal with the incredibly idiotic debt ceiling issue the Obama administration has put forward the so called “McConnell Plan.” It is a complicated Rude Goldberg procedure that would effectively allow the President to raise the debt ceiling while also letting Congress make mostly meaningless votes against it. Since the idea was originally [...]

One of the many absurd aspects about this whole debt ceiling deal is that part of the solution to this artificial crisis is to create another artificial crisis in the near future. The debt ceiling itself is a creation of Congress. There is no need to have periodic debt ceiling limit votes that create dangerous [...]