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http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2013/10/21/131021taco_talk_hertzberg
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.
—Amendment XIV, Section 4.
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"...When Lincoln faced secession if he continued to resist slavery’s expansion, he remarked, “A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you—and then you will be a murderer!’ ” Obama updated Lincoln, minus the lethal imagery: “If you’re in negotiations around buying somebody’s house, you don’t get to say, ‘Well, let’s talk about the price I’m going to pay, and if you don’t give the price then I’m going to burn down your house.’ ” Neither quip quite captures the perversity of the extortionists. They propose to shoot themselves as well as their hostage, and the house they would burn down is their house, too.
At the weekend, as public esteem for the Republican Party plunged to record lows, the elephants stampeded for the exits, raising clouds of dust. At this rate, the government shutdown may itself have been shut down by the time these words are read, with or without a fig leaf to cover the pachyderms’ privates. But the fanatical denialism of a large faction of the Republican Party is such that a default or the serious possibility of one may still be in the not too distant future. What then?
The President is constitutionally sworn to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” but if he enforces the debt ceiling, established by one law, he cannot meet obligations that other laws command him to fulfill. Nor can he submit to blackmail, lest the Constitution be informally amended to provide that any law, duly passed by the House and the Senate and signed by the President (and, if challenged, upheld by the Supreme Court), may be effectively voided by the action of one faction of one party in one half of the national legislature. And he absolutely cannot permit default, the consequences of which would be global and catastrophic.
It is widely said that the Obama Administration has “ruled out” recourse to the fourth section of the Fourteenth Amendment. Not so..."
