Shortly after President Obama acceded to office the editor of the Sun began arguing that America was entering a “constitutional moment.” It would arise, as he put it in an interview in the Wall Street Journal, because “we’re at a moment where we’re not going to be able to turn to either the Congress or the executive branch for help.” The “only defense now,” he said, “the only tool we have now, is the Constitution.” It’s hard to think of a clearer example of what he was talking about than the suggestion being made that the president of America can — even must — evade the legislated ceiling on debt because of the 14th Amendment.

This dodge has now been endorsed by the New York Times in a July 7 editorial referencing the 14th Amendment. It suggests that Mr. Obama “might want to consider the advice of several constitutional scholars who say Congress may not be able to put the government in default by refusing to raise the debt limit because the 14th Amendment says the public debt cannot be questioned.” This newspaper is not the Congress, but were we, we’d say, “Go ahead, make my day.” Certainly it’s hard to imagine better bedrock on which to make one’s stand than the question of who gets the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States.

The 14th Amendment, after all, includes some phrasing the New York Times fails to quote. What shall not be questioned is “[t]he validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law . . .” The boldface italics are ours, as are the italics in this sentence of the 14th Amendment: “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” It seems the drafters of the 14th Amendment and the states that passed it didn’t entirely trust the Courts — or the president, Andrew Johnson at the time — on this head. Our guess is that the Supreme Court of today can be counted on to bow to the Constitution.

Particularly because borrowing is an enumerated power granted so unambiguously, in Article I Section 8, to the Congress. The president has no independent power to borrow money. Nor has he any independent power to withdraw money from the treasury to pay for debts — or anything else — absent an appropriation by the Congress. On the contrary, he is flatly prohibited. This is another slab of bedrock. “No Money,” it says in Article I, Section 9, “shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”* It is hard to figure out how even the greatest of grammarians could construct a sentence that is more clear.

It’s also hard to rule out the possibility, however, unconstitutional, that the Obama administration might try to assert an independent authority to borrow on the theory that the borrowing is needed to meet debt payments. But it’s not hard to say that it’s a showdown we’d love to see. It would, we predict, throw nothing into such sharp relief as the fact that the only reason the failure to take on more debt would threaten debt service is that the administration is loathe to cut other parts of the budget to pay off, so to speak, its credit card bills. Those spending desires are what is threatening default.

Our guess is that we have a Supreme Court that could figure all this out. We’d go so far as to suggest it’s possible to imagine that a majority of the court would have the grit to put the federal government into a kind of Congressional receivership — with well-crafted a reminder that it is the responsibility of Congress to meet the strictures in respect of debt and spending that are written into the Constitution. This is the kind of thing we are down to, American bedrock. This is the “constitutional moment.” And our instinct is that the best strategy for the leadership in the Congress is not to let the moment pass but to seize it.

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* One of the greatest outbursts of anger at a newspaper ever encountered by your editor was when the Wall Street Journal, in an editorial undergirt by this constitutional fact, questioned whether a subscription by an American administration to capital of the World Bank was, in fact, an obligation of the United States if it had not gone through the appropriation process. The editorial, “A $500 Million Wager,” was issued on October 22, 1981.