WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden said on Thursday he was not ready to invoke the 14th Amendment to prevent the United States from defaulting on June 1. remove the option.
“We’re not quite there yet,” Biden said in an interview with MSNBC when asked about the possibility of triggering the Amendment.
A split US Congress has run out of time to raise the federal government’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling, warning the Treasury may not be able to pay bills by June 1 .
If Congress doesn’t act, some legal experts say Biden has other options to avert a crisis. That is to invoke the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to allow the U.S. to continue paying bills.
Section 4 of the Amendment, adopted after the Civil War of 1861-1865, states that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” However, this provision has been largely unaddressed by the courts.
Some experts have suggested that Biden could invoke the amendment to raise the debt ceiling if Congress doesn’t act.It will almost certainly lead to protracted legal disputes and could disrupt financial markets.
The White House and other government officials considered the possibility, but many dismissed it as a last-ditch solution unlikely to survive a court challenge.
Biden and the top Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Congress will sit down next Tuesday to end a three-month standoff over the federal debt ceiling and avoid a catastrophic default by the end of the month.
Both sides have a clear position. Biden has called on lawmakers to unconditionally increase the federally voluntarily imposed borrowing limit, and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said his Congress would not cut spending to address the problem. It said it would not approve any transactions. The country’s fiscal deficit is expanding.
Reported by Nandita Bose and Trevor Hunnicutt, Washington.Edited by Kim Coghill
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