Declaring a National Emergency
Jules Witcover

Unless House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and his merry band of tea party blackmailers blink soon, President Obama should take the only alternative that seems left to him in the debt-limit fight, short of abject surrender on no new taxes.

He should go to the American people and declare a national emergency requiring him to pay America's debts to avoid default, and a fiscal calamity of unknown proportions and ramifications.

It's been suggested by some legal scholars that he could do so by unilaterally invoking Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which begins: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law ... shall not be questioned." But Obama has expressed disinclination to argue that any limit on it therefore is unconstitutional.

Talk of such action has raised the temperature of conservatives who heretofore have championed a literal reading of the Constitution. But some of the same folks, as originalists, will point out that the 14 Amendment, enacted three years after the Civil War, referred to debts "including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion." Obviously, no such debts are involved now.

If Obama were to take this drastic action, there likely would be much huffing and puffing from the tea partiers and right-wing Republicans. But they would have little recourse, short of going to the Supreme Court or initiating the impeachment process against him. Either one would take months at least, by which time cooler Republican heads might reconsider their ideological stonewalling.

In any event, there would be no assurance that even the current court would side with them, or that impeachment would get anywhere. The lesson of how the Democratic Senate held its collective nose and let Bill Clinton off the hook after his impeachment by the House remains clear in memory.

If Obama is determined not to go the 14th Amendment route to save the country from further economic chaos, his legal geniuses ought to be able to come up some other means to avert the impending lemming-like plunge off the cliff. Politically if not morally, it is essential to him now to make the issue a matter of presidential leadership. He should not permit further endless wrangling with one house of the legislative branch of government in the hands of the opposition.

So far, the president has vacillated from continuing his early aspirations to work with the congressional Republicans, to appealing to their mutual interest in averting fiscal disaster, to scolding them like stubborn schoolchildren and finally to taking his case for balance and common sense to the public from the bully pulpit of the White House news conference.

With seeming incredulity, Obama continues to hammer at the Republicans' unyielding defense of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, apparently still believing that public opposition as reflected in the polls will somehow shame their defenders into compromise.

The president still implores the Republican leaders to strike what he calls a "balance." He says he will accept some entitlement cuts in cherished Democratic social safety-net to offset the much larger spending cuts already agreed to in the negotiations with Vice President Joe Biden.

But Cantor argues that his side is already offering "balance" in the deal by agreeing to some extension of the federal debt limit, without yielding an inch on new taxes. And the Republicans insist on referring to an end to the Bush cuts for millionaires and billionaires as a tax increase.

The political question now is who will get the blame if the approaching fiscal calamity happens, Obama because is the president or the GOP leaders for digging in and playing out their ideological hand? In the end, the man in the Oval Office must use whatever legal means he has to take charge.

In now saying he will not accept any short-term raising of the debt limit, the president finally is calling the Republican bluff as Clinton called Newt Gingrich's threat to permit a government closedown in 1995, and won. Obama, however, can't count on Boehner -- and Cantor, particularly -- blinking this time around.

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