President Biden has been considering ways to challenge the constitutionality of the debt limit to defuse the risk of default.
The agreement President Biden struck with House Republicans to raise the debt limit aims to avert a catastrophic default on the nation’s debt. But the brinkmanship that brought the United States within days of being unable to pay its bills has renewed calls for the Biden administration to stop the debt ceiling from continuing to be a political tool.
After declaring this year that he would not negotiate spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt limit, Mr. Biden did exactly that. The deal includes spending caps and scales back some of the president’s policy priorities in exchange for suspending the debt limit for two years.
The bill, which the House is expected to bring to a vote on Wednesday, has reopened the door to the debt limit being a perpetual point of leverage that allows the party in the minority — in this case, the Republicans — to use the borrowing cap to extract legislative concessions.
That has raised questions about whether there is a way to preclude another episode like this one — by abolishing the debt ceiling or using the 14th Amendment to render the statutory limit unconstitutional.
Mr. Biden opted against challenging the constitutionality of the debt limit this time around but suggested last week that he had the authority to do so and hinted that he might try to use it in the future.
“My hope and intention is when we resolve this problem, I’d find a rationale to take it to the courts to see whether or not the 14th Amendment is, in fact, something that would be able to stop it,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference in Japan after a gathering of leaders from the Group of 7 nations.
The president said on Sunday that any discussion about whether to invoke the 14th amendment was not imminent. “That’s another day,” he said.
Invoking the 14th Amendment has been floated as a potential solution to avoiding future debt limit fights because it includes a clause stating that “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.”
Some legal scholars say that clause overrides the statutory borrowing limit, which is set by Congress and can be lifted or suspended only with lawmaker approval.
The Biden administration has been studying whether it could use the 14th Amendment to circumvent Congress on the basis that it would be a violation of the law for the federal government not to pay its bills on time.
