Would you like your ceiling fixed with impeachment, or without?

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, via Washington Monthly, gives the president a statutory thumbs-up on the platinum coin option, explaining that it "entails just reading the plain language that Congress used." Adds Tribe, "It’s also quite clear that the minting of such a coin couldn’t be challenged; I don’t see who would have standing."

But here's the kicker, or rather the boomerang: "Bottom line: This is a situation," continues Tribe, "where the political and economic considerations, not the legal considerations, have to drive the decision-making."

Precisely. And a variation of that bottom line--a situation where political considerations, not economic and legal considerations, drive the decision-making--would unquestionably, I think, ensnare the president in impeachment. And therein lies the "challenge." 

So the president has the legal authority to mint a platinum coin. So what? Presidents have the authority to get blowjobs in the White House, too. But that didn't stop the GOP House under Bill Clinton from impeaching him. And if we learned any constitutional truism from Clinton's experience, it was that any House can impeach any president for any damn reason it wants--and that includes purely political ones.

Now of course one could argue that President Obama should valiantly risk impeachment by minting such a coin and thereby save the nation from economic catastrophe--that in one quick press he could avert a wickedly grueling affair. Yet in arguing that case, one would almost certainly be required to also accept that Obama would merely be trading one national nightmare for another--a one- or two-year impeachment process, which would just as unambiguously demonstrate to the world and its markets that the United States has become an utterly ungovernable, hopelessly dysfunctional country.

Comments

[Susan Zoon]

Thanks, PM. The "One coin to rule them all," thing has taken root so quickly and so stubbornly, I wondered if it were not a trap. I can hear their thinking,"Make the tyrant usurper show himself." Is this the culmination of the GOP long game on Obama? Where is Tolkien when you need him?

[janicket]

We know that elements of the GOP have been hungry for an excuse, any excuse, to impeach this president ever since he took office; have so far been unable to turn any molehill into a prosecutable mountain, thanks to whatever sanity still remains to the leaders of their caucus; and now the platinum-coin enthusiasts are yammering for Obama to give the impeach mob an issue they can run with on a platinum tray?

[shsavage]

The House GOP thinks they've got PBO in an impeachment box, where anything he does other than cave is an impeachable offense. Of course, none of them has sufficient math skills to count to 60. But, since his impeachment may be inevitable with the whackos in the House, it makes sense for PBO to respond to the debt ceiling in the most constitutional way possible. The trillion-dollar coin trick is legal, but it's just too cute, and would set a nasty precedent. I prefer the 14th Amendment route.

[Thrasymachus]

The House Republicans aren't about to let Obama get away without impeaching him for *something*, so let it be this. Senators come from states, the borders of which can it be gerrymandered. Good luck convincing 66 Senators that the President of the United States should be removed from office for taking action to prevent the US from defaulting on its debt.