It looks like the big guns of the Democratic Party are booming for President Obama to do an end run around Congress in respect of the debt ceiling. First it was President Clinton, who said if he were president he wouldn’t hesitate to raise the debt ceiling himself. Then it was Senator Reid, who said he’d support Mr. Obama in such a course. Over the weekend, the minority leader in the House, Mrs. Pelosi, declared on television that she’d just “use the 14th amendment,” which, she averred, “says the debt of the United States will always be paid.” Poor Bob Schieffer nearly fell off his chair. “You would just go ahead and do it, you wouldn’t wait for Congress?” That’s when Mrs. Pelosi said, “I would just go do it.”

This is one of those situations in which we’re prepared to look down the long barrel of the United States Constitution and say, “Go ahead, make my day.” We can’t say for sure where the Supreme Court might come out. In the Obamacare case, it crumpled worse than a rusty fender. But it would be in the national interest to get the debt question sorted out one way or another. Just who has the borrowing power in the constitutional structure? Just what does the Constitution require when it comes to taking on new debt when the claim is that the money is going to be used to pay off debts already contracted? And is it time to take a look at the only case in which the Supreme Court ruled on the 14th Amendments debt clause?

That would be Perry v. United States. It was brought by one John Perry, who wanted to redeem in gold a bond America had contracted to redeem in gold. Congress, in support of FDR, had voided private gold holdings. Perry lost the case and got stuck with paper money. Feature, though, what the court said. Citing the 14th Amendment, which says that the validity of the debt of the United States shall not be questioned, the court ruled that the government could not repudiate its own debt. Here is how the Chief Justice of the United States at the time, Charles Evans Hughes, put it for the court’s five to four majority:

“The Fourteenth Amendment, in its fourth section, explicitly declares: ‘The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, . . . shall not be questioned.’ While this provision was undoubtedly inspired by the desire to put beyond question the obligations of the government issued during the Civil War, its language indicates a broader connotation. We regard it as confirmatory of a fundamental principle which applies as well to the government bonds in question, and to others duly authorized by the Congress, as to those issued before the Amendment was adopted. Nor can we perceive any reason for not considering the expression ‘the validity of the public debt’ as embracing whatever concerns the integrity of the public obligations.”

But then, in the next paragraph, Hughes let the government off the hook, saying, in effect, that although the government had violated the Constitution, Perry hadn’t been damaged. This was because Congress had made it illegal for him to own gold. In theory this meant that the government could redeem a bond for which it was paid 483.79 ounces of gold by paying the holder the equivalent of 285.71 ounces of gold. The reasoning infuriated the Four Horsemen — the conservative minority of the high bench, including Willis Van Devanter, George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, and Jas. McReynolds — to a degree that became clear only after the Chief Justice delivered his opinion from the bench.

This happened when McReynolds, a Democrat no-less and a former attorney general under President Wilson, spoke extemporaneously for the minority. It became one of the most memorable moments in the Court’s history. A description of it was run off the top of page one of the New York Times under the headline “Constitution Gone, Says M’Reynolds.” The Gray Lady described the remarks of the justice as “bristling with scorn and indignation” that brought “gasps” from “startled spectators.” He expressed “shame and humiliation,” the Times reported, adding that “[s]arcasm and irony were behind sentence after sentence.”

“It is a plain, simple tale,” the Times quoted McReynolds as saying, before pausing and then adding: “It seems impossible to overestimate the result of what has been done here today.” Here, the Times reported, “he spoke of the Constitution, adding that it did not seem ‘too much to say that it is gone.’” It quoted him as saying the “guarantees to which men and women heretofore have looked to protect their interests have been swept away” and as assering thqt the “powers of Congress have been enlarged, and we stand as a people today stripped of the very fundamentals.”

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It may be that none of this will come up in the current debt crisis. President Obama’s spokesman, James Carney, said in December that the administration “does not believe that the 14th Amendment gives the president the power to ignore the debt ceiling — period.” But we don’t mind saying that we wouldn’t be disappointed were Mr. Obama to take up the advice of Mrs. Pelosi, Senator Reid, and President Clinton. Perry was the one case where the Supreme Court focused on the clause about how the validity of the debt of the United States shall not be questioned. Perry was a most infuriating opinion of a sharply divided court. It deserves another look. We’d like to think that were the court to take another look, it would start to consider whether fiat money of the kind in use today can satisfy the mighty 14th, particularly at a time when the dollar has collapsed to a level — below a 1,600th of an ounce of gold — that would have left every justice on the Hughes bench speechless with a sense of betrayal.