Progressives Keep Revealing What They Really Think about Norms

By Becket Adams

Sunday, June 04, 2023

 

Left-wing opposition to the Trump administration was rarely about principle.

 

It was usually about power.

 

Put another way, Trump’s critics didn’t object so much to what he did, but to the fact that they weren’t the ones with the power to do it. For all the talk about lawfulness, norms, decency, etc., Democrats and Democratic-aligned interests keep proving that they don’t care all that much for lawfulness, norms, decency, etc.

 

They seem to care only that they are seated at the head of the table.

 

That Democrats and members of the press themselves promote the sort of lawlessness they claimed to oppose during the Trump administration was on display yet again in the recent fight over the national debt. To wit, certain members of the press and Democrats argued that Section 4 of the 14th Amendment grants the president the power to borrow and spend as he pleases regardless of whether Congress extends the debt ceiling — as in, regardless of whether the branch with the power of the purse has any say. Throughout this process, they were asking explicitly for Biden to do an end run around Congress, encouraging him to issue debt not approved by Congress, which alone has the power “to borrow Money on the credit of the United States,” and all in explicit violation of the Constitution and the president’s oath of office.

 

It was an exceptionally short-sighted, dangerous, and even dim-witted proposal, one that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen herself claimed would trigger a “constitutional crisis” should the president attempt it. But you try telling this to the “norms” crowd. They were awfully excited there for a moment at the prospect of executive lawlessness.

 

Indeed, though the debt-ceiling deal has been passed, and we’ve moved on from yet another fiscal showdown, we’re still left with the stench of the partisan desperation that came before, including the calls for the president to waltz himself into a “constitutional crisis.”

 

America is hurtling “toward default on its debts and the subsequent economic cataclysm,” wrote the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent, expressing concern that the president was “running out of options.” But, they assured their readers, he still had “a way out — remaining prepared to invoke the 14th Amendment to pay the country’s bills after the debt limit is breached.” Worried that Biden seemed “to be taking this off the table in advance,” they felt he “might inexplicably be cornering himself.”

 

They continued: “Biden aides have reportedly told lawmakers that this option would be dangerously destabilizing. That goes much further than arguing that it would be subject to litigation and makes it harder to adopt this course later.” So why, they rhetorically asked, should he do it? “If nothing else, Biden should want Republicans to believe he’s prepared to adopt that course if necessary.”

 

It is somewhat humorous, really, how often left-wingers seem to forget that Biden is no true-blue left-winger. It’s true that on several key policies he has caved to their desires. But he also occasionally takes the moderate path (the one he ran on) over the hard-core progressive one, as he did this time in striking a debt-ceiling deal with Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to avert the crisis. Biden’s a company man, after all. Boy, if you can’t count on the senator from the credit-card state to be a true progressive ally, then whom can you count on?

 

A New York Times editorial suggested elsewhere that Biden should still think seriously about a 14th Amendment–style solution to future debt crises:

 

The blunt instrument of the debt ceiling allowed this standoff and its concessions. With the Republicans in control of the House, Democrats in Congress have given up their path to change this for now. The president seemed to acknowledge that this month when he told reporters that he’d consider declaring the debt ceiling unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment’s debt clause and letting the courts decide whether he is right. . . .

 

If Congress approves this agreement, the threat of default will be over for the next two years. At that point, Mr. Biden and his legal experts need to follow through on his interest in testing a constitutional solution and try to stop the debt crisis from returning in 2025 or thereafter.

 

In Congress, Trump’s loudest and most frequent critics, the ones who spent much of the years 2015 through 2020 declaring their great love for law and democracy and beating their chests about threats thereto, drafted letters demanding that Biden invoke the so-called 14th Amendment option. Five senators, Democrats Tina Smith of Minnesota, Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey of Massachusetts, and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, circulated a letter recommending that Biden prepare to deploy the congressional “workaround.” On social media, Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island also called on Biden to invoke the 14th Amendment. In the House, 66 Democratic representatives, including Pramila Jayapal, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman, Katie Porter, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jerrold Nadler, and Sheila Jackson Lee, sent a similar letter to the president, pleading with him to make their jobs even more irrelevant.

 

Begging the chief executive to ignore Congress in favor of One Weird Trick that former President Obama himself dismissed as a nonstarter during 2011 budget negotiations, and all of it in clear violation of the language of the Constitution and even the purpose of the three separated branches, is not exactly what one would expect from the same people who spent the Trump years weeping and wailing about our beloved “norms.” Indeed, the 14th Amendment solution in Republican hands, particularly Trump’s, would earn weeks of negative coverage, congressional condemnation, and maybe even another round of impeachment.

 

Then again, as is obvious by this point, much of the opposition during the Trump years was never about “norms” and lawfulness. It was always about “we’re not in power, and that’s a problem.”