Is President Biden angling to evade the constitution in the debt limit battle? That’s the question after the Times’ dispatch on the White House “debate” over whether to mount “a constitutional challenge to the debt limit.” The scheme, the Times says, is to rely on the 14th Amendment to keep “issuing new debt” if “Congress fails to lift the limit.” The report, which has the earmarks of a trial balloon, suggests a misreading of the Constitution. 

The President of America lacks the power to borrow money. He can’t use so much as a government credit card. The power to borrow money on the credit of the United States is granted solely to the Congress. It’s the second power granted to the legislature after the power to tax. It’s right there in Article I, Section 8. The idea that the power to borrow was somehow transferred to the President by the 14th Amendment is chimerical.

That’s putting it charitably. Even the Times’ report calls the idea being weighed by “Biden’s aides” an “untested theory.” Yet it’s been “a subject of intense and unresolved debate,” the Times avers. Sources “inside the administration” tell the Gray Lady that “the law is unclear and so is the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to tax and spend.” It strikes us that, as far as legal and constitutional matters go, it doesn’t get much clearer.

Biden and his aides are being egged on by liberal academics like a legal sage at the University Oregon’s law school, Garrett Epps, who contends the Constitution “bars the federal government from defaulting on the debt — even a little.” So, he says, “if Congress decides to default,” then “the president has the power and the obligation to pay it.” That’s even “without Congressional permission,” Mr. Epps evades.

Historian Eric Foner has also called for Mr. Biden to invoke the 14th Amendment to escape the current “impasse.” The amendment, which states that the “validity of the public debt of the United States” shall “not be questioned,” allows Mr. Biden to “act on his own” to pay America’s obligations, he says. As we have noted, though, the 14th amendment gives Mr. Biden no unilateral power, and was ratified to ensure the debt was repaid in gold.* 

The post-Civil War Republican Congress put forward the 14th Amendment to bar any “attempted scaling down of the national debt directly or indirectly by repudiating the promise to pay in gold,” legal sage Phanor Eder writes. The Times endorsed Eder’s analysis in an editorial issued in 1933 about the debt clause, which the editorial called the 14th Amendment’s “forgotten section.” The Times homed in on the word “validity” of the debt. 

“At the time of the adoption of the amendment there was no doubt what it was supposed to mean,” the Times wrote, pointing to the Congressional record. “Any lingering ambiguity or uncertainty must have been dispelled by the words used by President Grant in his inaugural address.” That’s when Grant proclaimed that “to protect the national honor, every dollar of government indebtedness should be paid in gold.”

Writing after FDR had defaulted on the national debt by breaking the gold standard and barring private ownership of the monetary metal, the Times’ editors lamented that “we have lived to see our government do what President Grant declared to be dishonorable.” It’s even more troubling that Mr. Biden is mulling a further breach of the “national honor” by borrowing money in defiance of Congress — and the Constitution.

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* Of which we have a little more than 8,000 metric tons.