Joe Biden Is Easily Goaded into Lawlessness

By Noah Rothman

Monday, May 22, 2023

 

“There is nothing that makes either of us more angry than a bully,” First Lady Jill Biden warned reporters in advance of her husband’s presidential campaign. “There is nothing that makes us want to pick a fight more than that.” Tough talk on behalf of the Americans who the Bidens alleged were so frequently antagonized by Donald Trump’s White House. But what about the president himself, whose foremost tormentor is not Trump? The bullying to which the president has been subjected comes not from the GOP but his left flank. Biden’s ordeal is typified by campaigns of emotional manipulation, moral blackmail, and peer pressure — campaigns to which the president regularly succumbs.

 

Jim Geraghty writes today on the president’s flirtation with a bargaining-phase contrivance supposedly designed to circumvent Congress and invalidate the will of voters who, in 2022, handed control of the chamber in which legislation pertaining to appropriations must originate: the so-called 14th Amendment option. The half-baked scheme to vest the president with the unilateral power to issue new sovereign debt was, Jim observes, branded by the president’s own Treasury secretary a pathway to “a constitutional crisis” just two weeks ago. Now, however, amid merciless prodding from his progressive allies, Biden has suddenly seen the merits in at least “looking at the 14th Amendment” for loopholes that 150 years of constitutional jurisprudence somehow overlooked.

 

If Biden saw any merit in this ploy during his tenure as vice president when he served as “chief emissary to the Hill in budget negotiations” under Barack Obama, he kept his cards close to his chest. At least, he declined to contradict the members of the administration in which he served who flatly ruled the prospect out.

 

“I have talked to my lawyers,” Obama told an audience in 2011 when he was asked if he could “basically ignore this debt ceiling rule” via a constitutional loophole. “They are not persuaded that that is a winning argument.” General counsel for then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was even more unequivocal. “[T]he Constitution explicitly places the borrowing authority with Congress, not the President.” When the prospect was raised again in 2013, former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney assured reporters that the president’s view hadn’t changed. The 14th Amendment was not a “credible alternative” to congressional action. When it comes to the debt ceiling, he added, the “president can’t raise it by himself.” Neither a reinterpretation of the law nor the politics of the debt ceiling are responsible for Biden’s change of heart. All that seems to have changed is that the president’s allies now insist upon the president’s acquiescence, and he has obliged.

 

Biden was similarly persuaded to tempt the wrath of the judiciary by creative left-wing legal theorists when the object of their desire was the preservation of the pandemic-inspired moratorium on evictions. When Biden unilaterally extended that dubious prohibition via executive order, the Supreme Court deferred to the White House by electing not to strike the measure down summarily. Rather, they would allow it to sunset on its own, which was the Biden administration’s plan. But the White House did not keep their word.

 

Biden extended the moratorium again, brazenly adding that he was all but certain what he was doing was illegal. “The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass Constitutional muster,” the president confessed. It was, however, “worth the effort” to test that proposition in Court — not because that was a viable way to preserve an emergency order abrogating the rights of American property owners (the spurned justices on the high court unceremoniously invalidated Biden’s last moratorium extension) but because that’s what progressives wanted.

 

The same could be said for the president’s authority to forgive the debt held by federal student-loan borrowers. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was skeptical of the novel legal theories sprouting up around the progressive left’s latest McGuffin. “The president can’t do it,” she told reporters at the time. “That’s not even a discussion.” “I don’t have the authority,” Biden said flatly. The president drew a distinction, however, between forgiving $50,000 in student-loan debt and $10,000 in individual debt forgiveness, which he said he was “prepared to write off” regardless of the legal consequences. The president and the speaker were correct — at least, according to legal experts and law professors who anticipate a Supreme Court ruling that will clarify whether the president can unilaterally raid the U.S. Treasury to satisfy the demands of an influential but ideologically blinkered constituency.

 

Either the progressive vanguard is so persuasive that they routinely convince Biden to subordinate his better legal judgment to whatever their desiderata are at the moment, or the president is buckling to peer pressure. If this White House is genuinely spoiling for a fight with America’s bullies, their progressive cheering section presents them with a target-rich environment.