They can't be serious...[again]

On July 28^th, Paul Abrams wrote an article on the Huffington Post titled “Constitution Prohibits ‘Deadbeat Nation’ in which he argues the following:

“Because the 14th Amendment states, the "validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law....shall not be questioned", the country must pay its public debt. There is no discretion, no choice. Yes, it is Congress that has borrowing, taxing and spending powers, but the 14th Amendment's command that the country's obligations be paid makes it clear that those powers are not discretionary once an obligation has been authorized by law.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-abrams/14th-amendment-congress_b_912776.html

What we see here is akin to the same sort of rhetorical slight of hand that lead to the horrible Supreme Court decision in Kelo vs New London that allowed municipalities to take property from legitimate land owners and give it to wealthier people who want to put more expensive properties in their places. The justification for this horrible decision was made when John Paul Stevens wrote in the Majority opinion that, though the Constitution used the term “public use” when describing the cases that allow a government to take property, the Supreme Court would decide the case as if it was written as “public purpose’. [While this was not directly stated, the effect was nonetheless devastating to those who have lost their homes to developers in the mean time.]

Here, we again see an attempt to bastardize the language and meaning in the Constitution by those who simply find it too difficult to live within its boundaries.

In the article listed above, Abrams quickly gives the actual text of the 14^th Amendment [using the proper term debt] before going on to argue for paragraph after paragraph, as if instead of “debt” the Constitution had used the term “obligation.” This is yet another attempt to alter the meaning of the Constitution by simply misquoting it; by changing the meaning of the words it contains. Debts and obligations are two different things. A debt is something that has already been incurred while an obligation is something that we have said we will incur in the future.

It is a direct lie at this point to suggest that anyone has questioned the debt itself. In fact, all discussions up to this point are over how we will handle this debt moving forward; the discussion is about how to limit the obligations that continue to cause the debt to grow.

Suggesting that the 14th amendment applies here is a true bastardization of its intent and can only point to the nefarious intent of those who suggest it applies or to their incredible lack of intelligence.

One can only hope that this fallacious argument does not lead to any action from the President that would only serve to further damage to the Constitution itself.