Be Careful What You Put Into Liberal Heads

"Be very, very careful what you put into that head,
because you will never, ever get it out." -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey

Why is it some arguments though patently idiotic continue to receive widespread acceptance? The latest fairy tale that will not die, at least for its proponents, is the notion that the fourteenth amendment gives the president the power to borrow money.
"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law ... shall not be questioned," it reads. Fine that's understood. Public debt authorized by law must be paid. We have already addressed this argument in a previous post. Harvard law professor and friend Barack Obama, Laurence Tribe who first promoted the idea has backed away from it in a New York Times editorial. Basically the professor is saying that the fourteenth amendment won't fix the problem so don't go there. He argues, as I have in that previous post, that new bonds issued under executive authority would come with a legal cloud that would raise interest rates due to investor loss of confidence, and he adds that a judicial decision resolving the matter would be hard to obtain, because nobody really has standing to sue. But Professor Tribe should have remembered Cardinal Wolsey's advice before he spoke. Rather than "that head" we have "those heads" at Firedog Lake, the New York Sun, and the New York Times who now have the idea in their heads and logic is futile.

Don't wave the Constitution at bond traders. As Professor Tribe notes the bonds would be under a legal cloud .Try this. Suppose Obama listens to Firedog Lake et al. Suppose further that Ron Paul or Michele Bachmann introduces a resolution stating that the Congress will honor no debt issued by the President and bond traders had better read Laurence Tribe's editorial before they buy into Obama's paper hanging scheme. How many bond could Treasury sell?