Progressive Senators DEMAND President Biden Use This Amendment Now

Jamie Raskin, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren call for President Joe Biden to answer the GOP's economic hostage-taking with unilateral action to prevent a default. President Joe Biden can invoke the 14th Amendment to keep borrowing and avert a catastrophic first-ever U.S. default.

Senator Nina Turner and Mayor Mondale Robinson break it down on Unbossed.

Read more here

Members of Congress, legal scholars, and even the union representing federal workers are calling on the White House to answer the GOP's economic hostage-taking with unilateral action to prevent a default.

As congressional leaders prepare for a Tuesday meeting at the White House, Congressman Jamie Raskin, a constitutional scholar, affirmed Sunday that if GOP lawmakers won't raise the debt ceiling without major spending cuts, President Joe Biden can invoke the 14th Amendment to keep borrowing and avert a catastrophic first-ever U.S. default.

Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says in part, "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law... shall not be questioned."

Asked whether the president could and should use that part of the amendment to combat Republican efforts to hold the global economy hostage, Raskin (D-Md.) told MSNBC's Jen Pskai—Biden's former press secretary—that "I think he has that authority under these circumstances, absolutely, because the Congress has put him in a constitutionally untenable position."

"If he decides to default for the country, he's... violating the Constitution, because the 14th Amendment says you can't do that," Raskin said of Biden, pointing to a New York Times opinion piece by Harvard University professor emeritus Laurence Tribe.

Tribe—whose previous students include Raskin along with former President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Elena Kagan—detailed why he has changed his mind on the debt limit argument.

"The question isn't whether the president can tear up the debt limit statute to ensure that the Treasury Department can continue paying bills submitted by veterans' hospitals or military contractors or even pension funds that purchased government bonds," he wrote Sunday. "The question isn't whether the president can in effect become a one-person Supreme Court, striking down laws passed by Congress."

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