Bill Clinton Says He’d Raise the Debt Ceiling, ‘Force the Courts to Stop Me’
The ongoing and unprecedented debate taking place in Washington over whether the debt ceiling should be raised has been stressful for President Obama, and sparked much partisan debate over how the issue should be handled.
One former president has weighed in on the controversy, though, and it kind of makes you feel like when you run into an old flame at a bar or dinner and he looks hot and successful and you get that pang. Not that Americans don’t dig Obama okay, but tell me you didn’t get some post-Clinton shivers when you read his remarks on how to handle the debt ceiling debate.
The ex-Commander in Chief wouldn’t even entertain any of this “will they or won’t they” nonsense from Republicans, saying he’d rather push America up against a wall and shove an increase down our hesitant throats. Clinton friskily remarked:
Former President Bill Clinton says that he would invoke the so-called constitutional option to raise the nation’s debt ceiling “without hesitation, and force the courts to stop me…” Sharply criticizing Congressional Republicans in an exclusive Monday evening interview with The National Memo, Clinton said, “I think the Constitution is clear and I think this idea that the Congress gets to vote twice on whether to pay for [expenditures] it has appropriated is crazy.”
Lifting the debt ceiling “is necessary to pay for appropriations already made,” he added, “so you can’t say, ‘Well, we won the last election and we didn’t vote for some of that stuff, so we’re going to throw the whole country’s credit into arrears.”
Clinton cited the 14th Amendment (stating “the validity of the US public debt shall not be questioned”) but says he’d never been forced to review it during his presidency, because the GOP never resorted to using the debt ceiling as leverage.
