The Public Debt Clause of the 14th Amendment states: “The Validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law …. shall not be questioned.” Recent debates—including the most recent standoff between President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy over the debt ceiling—have raised the question as to whether this clause can be invoked to overcome the crisis. In today’s episode, we drill down on why the public debt clause was written, how it's been interpreted by the Supreme Court, and how things might play out today if it were used by President Biden. Guests Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Eric Foner, author of The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, and law professor Gerard Magliocca, author of American Founding Son: John Bingham and the Invention of the Fourteenth Amendment, discuss this often-overlooked section of the 14th Amendment written at the end of the Civil War.
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